Nerd Industries: Stuart Robinson's blog

It's finally happened. After many long hours and much facial hair madness (featured in the LA Times), a beta version of the Powerset search engine is now live at powerset.com. I've been working at Powerset for over a year now, and it's great to see this come to fruition. We had a launch party on Thursday. And I think a good time was had by all. (Okay, maybe not all. There was one poor fellow doubled over a bench outside, vomitting. But certainly most.) Now it's back to the trenches (or, as the Dutch say, terug aan de slag).

It's a sign of the generally low opinion that the public holds of semantics that whenever a discussion of meaning comes up, it can be dismissed as "just semantics". But semantics is important stuff, and I think the world is wising up to the fact that we need machines that can reckon in terms of it. I've been reading the press surrounding the launch of Powerset over the last week and people seem to be struggling to come to terms with this technology, literally. What I mean is that people can't seem to agree on what term to use for it: an understanding engine, a contextual search engine, a natural language processing (NLP) search engine, etc. And let's not forget about the term semantic search. According to the answers provided to an on-line quiz, the Industry Standard considers Powerset to be "the first semantic search engine"!