Cognition’s Semantic NLP is technology that focuses on the understanding of word and phrase meanings in modern computer applications. Cognition’s goal is to make its clients’ technologies more “human-like” in the understanding of language and more profitable.

Cognition isn’t trying to be a full Web search engine, but you can compare Cognition’s Semantic NLP on the same dataset (Wikipedia) here: wikipedia.cognition.com. Do the same searches on both and see what you get.

You can also try it on other vertical data sets:
CASELAW.Cognition.com
MEDLINE.Cognition.com

If you’re a Google power searcher, it won’t be useful to you.

Better for Main Street, U.S.A. — but that’s the real market.

BTW, I’ve been in their beta for several months, so I’m speaking as someone who has used it rather than someone who has just read about it.

“My guess is that the internal mantra has been ‘even if we can’t get consumers to use this, we will get acquired for our engineering talent and IP’”

Actually, the internal mantra is “My God, we are really doing it. We really are building a NL search engine. Holy shit!”

Why?
Well, we really are doing amazingly well on wikipedia.And that’s not easy, especially when we are not tuning and crossing our fingers and anticipating queries as @8 suggests but we are doing the real work of getting NL search to work. So right now on Wikipedia we are doing better than anyone else can possibly do on many queries and as good as anyone can do on most others. And we’ve only just started. We have the knowhow and the team and the clear sense of how to improve. People think NL is terribly difficult? Boy are they right. NL Search or any other NL application for that matter IS rocket science. But remember, rocket scientists figure out how to build rockers. That’s what they do. We have a team of rocket scientists in NL and search and we know how to do this. For us, launch is just the beginning.

Something to keep in mind.
Our product improves everyday. We’ve got incredible headroom. The other guys? With their technology, they are happy with teensy improvements in core search over a year. With our technology, we’re heading for improvements in relevance in the doube digits in the same timespan.

So. The mantra:
“Holy shit. We are actually doing this.”
It’s chanted everyday — even by people who do not sport facial hair.

Weren’t Vaporset (excuse me, Powerset) suppose to launch on TC40? What was the deal with them when you accepted them to the conference? Weren’t the part of the deal that they launch there or was there some deception on either your or their part?

Just curious,
Dave

It is easy to criticize and hard to act.