San Francisco based search startup Powerset will be launching shortly. For now, Powerset will query only Wikipedia and Freebase. But as I said when the product was demo’d to me a few weeks ago, it is compelling nonetheless: “When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search.”
But now the company may have to make a hard decision: sell now to one of the big Internet players looking for a point of differentiation in search, or take the risk of going it alone and possibly getting a huge, multi-billion dollar payoff down the road.
According to our sources, Powerset is exploring both options. They hired Dave Wehner, a Managing Director at investment bank Allen & Co. (he’s the guy who sold Bebo for $850 million to AOL, and is working on LinkedIn’s huge financing), to represent them in a possible sale or financing.
CNET is reporting today that Microsoft may be bidding for the company. According to our sources, those discussions have been going on for well over a month, and their most recent bid is “around $100 million.”
That probably won’t be enough to convince Powerset and their investors to sell. The big question is whether Google will step in to try and keep Powerset out of Microsoft’s hands, and start a real bidding war. That could drive the price significantly higher. Google, however, has publicly dismissed the notion of contextual search as a revolutionary step forward.
Whether that’s true or not is yet to be seen. But Powerset may find itself as a valuable chess piece in the emerging search war between Google and Microsoft. And if Google bets wrong, they could find their commanding lead in search eroded over time. A relatively small acquisition to keep Powerset out of Microsoft’s hands, even if just a hedging move, may suddenly be attractive to them.
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“But as I said when the product was demo’d to me a few weeks ago, it is compelling nonetheless: “When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search.””
So, you don´t have a clue about search. It´s absurd to rate an search engine on only 2 domains. If Powerset had to crawl the whole web, I assume their results would be pretty bad. So - they should sell …
Jojo - correct, I do not know much about search. But the feeling I had when i used the service, and saw how it parsed the content is was indexing, was a rare Aha moment nonetheless.
The real issue with scaling to the entire web is ranking of results, which you just can’t test on such a small scale. Ranking certainly isn’t trivial. But if they were able to get ranking right, Powerset would be the search engine I use every day.
No.. i really think powerset is on to something really big.. hold on it to it guys!
Powerset took too much risk and upset some investors. Why?!?!
They spend too much time putting vaporware-hype news. After I test the beta product. I didn’t like it either. Don’t get me wrong. My friend tried it. he didn’t like it. He didn’t find it hype. Powerset like another Joost product.
They put too many junks over there. I won’t say it. They have to fix themselves.
Hey - pretty certain Barney and the guys from FF will make the right decision. I would love to see the extension of this technology, and am looking forward to its evolution.
If they are already thinking about selling/deciding or not to sell… my guess is that they should sell. When you are already making such decisions even before you launch, it really shows how much passion you have for your product/company. In this case, very little passion
You need strong passion to build a great company. Especially when you are in the search business with giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. If you want to go heads on with them, then you don’t shrink. You want to compete with the big boys, then show the world that you are the courageous underdog that is not afraid of losing, build your winning character and show what you got. Show the world that you are not just a “business” but an idea worth spreading. If your product is really good and people likes you, they will stick with you. It will just go viral!
If you tell the world - “Ermm .. maybe I should just sell?” … perhaps you have lost the war even you before you step into the battleground. The bottom-line is - show some passion and dare to be different. That’s how great companies like Google (can’t believe I said this) and Apple (oh yeah!) make history! Be a leader!
It’s actually pretty simple nowdays to rank sites right.
I know a company that has the results much better then google, but it’s the marketing that lets a searchengine grow. It’s getting harder when people try to abuse your ranking on purpose )
Natural language search could be just the feature to get free media advertising. Who would know about google if yahoo didn’t put them on their site…
Go go go Powerset … towards Microsoft
$100M for a company that has not launched and indexes only 2 sites (both of which are well written and structured)? For serious?
Sounds like PowerSet is launching at just the right time to start a bidding war.
In the end though, it will come down to whether they are the product we are hoping for or whether they are vaporware as some comments allege.
Sell for sure…
People keep insisting on thinking that natural language search is a revolutionary thing, but it is not such a big deal, mainly for people that are accustomed with the information retrieval technologies.
Merging techniques, profile creation and analysis, etc. That’s a nice thing to do.
Steve Newcomb is most expensive guy in powerset. For… Barney Pell. Hahha. CEO party guy. He’s nothing.
I would laugh if microsoft, google, yahoo acquire powerset with Barney pell.
They should buy only powerset with Steve Newcomb. He most important silicon valley nerd than bold head party guy.
Mike - Why are you trying so hard to plug powerset? BTW, still haven’t answered my questions on your previous post. Comments #23 & #50 on http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....ing-weeks/
Search can improve.. all those SEO websites which are just capitilising on PageRank ruin the experience.
More disruptors please, don’t sell if you have intersested buyers already then why is it going to make any difference launching. The only fear is your product isn’t good enough or can scale well then sell and you bluffed your way to a big win.. but if you really have the nuts.. grab them.
to quote Techcrunch’s paraphrasing of Google’s stance: “natural-language approach is useful on the back-end to create better results, but it does not present a better user experience.”
I agree
Powerset is an irrelevant company that has made a lot of noise and has no substance whatsoever. Search is a business that demands an ability to scale to large amounts of data. For all the funding they have raised, all they to show is a toy application that runs ona couple of websites, and canned demo searches.
Buying them will be a big distraction for Microsoft. If I were Google, I’d let MSFT buy them just to screw them up a bit more.
Damn spelling is very bad there.. sorry! Let me try again:
More disruptors please! Don’t sell ,if you have interested buyers already then why is it going to make any difference if you launch? The only fear is your product isn’t good enough or can’t scale well, if so then sell and you bluffed your way to a big win.. But if you really have the nuts.. grab them.
I really feel, Mike, that your aha moment might have been due to the Eliza effect. In any case, it would be a moment of sublime absurdity if someone actually bought them for 100m without knowledge on how it scales.
The only reason Powetset is getting all these fluff attention is due to the fact that Pell was an EIR at Mayfield and had investor connections. If this was a product of someone else out of Silicon Valley, you would not have heard a peep about it.
100 million for a company that has not even launched their product? Talk about bubble 2.0.
Why would Google try to acquire Powerset when they can create technology like this in-house. Think about it. They have thousands of “Barney Pell’s” at Google.
I think the current stuff in Powerlabs rocks, and look forward to next week (Monday?), when they launch, so that people can see firsthand the impact of computational linguistics not on just on query processing, but on real understanding of content and relationships spanning multiple documents - that’s just wild and way cool, and it starts breaking up the concrete that has hardened around the search experience we have gotten used to over the past decade.
For those wanting them to fail, save your gunpowder - it is too late. They are actually delivering something that is a real step function improvement, if an imperfect mass market experience day 1. Check it out yourself next week, then opine.
I’m surprised you said a-ha the first time you used google. Lets face it, ads are what made them powerful. I don’t know anyone who loves ads.
It just shows these battles are won on sentiment, not technology.
to switch from google to somewhere else for searching, you need a better name. “powerset” is not one of them.
Excited to see this thing in action! Typo on the last line btw.
ClutterMe.com - aha moments to last a lifetime.
(v 2.0 coming soon)
MathandCheeseWiz,
How long have you been working at Powerset?
You crack me up.lol.
sell it, that is if its worth anything. its way to tough to get in search game now.
@1, @13, totally agreed.
just amazing how many people continue to fall for the powerset hype, and who don’t understand how search engines actually work. in particular @7, “It’s actually pretty simple nowdays to rank sites right.”, do you have any idea what you are talking about?
there are 3 areas that dominate search relevance today that Powerset would have to solve to get even in the web search game and NLP will not help them address any of them while MSFT, GOOG, and YHOO are spending 100s of millions of dollars, have 1000s of engineers working on these problems and have a 5+ year lead:
1. navigational searches (what PageRank solved). 12% and more than 30% of all search sessions are navigational (e.g., “tech crunch”). Google has worked now for 7+ years on the problem and still gets it wrong for some queries. Not impacted by NLP.
2. freshness / index size. The indexed part of the web is now between 50 and 100 billion documents, with google resulting to approaches like site maps and crawling dynamic sites by automatically filling in forms. For example, search for “Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell” and they have the article as the #1 result. do you have any idea how hard it is to get this done? Not impacted by NLP.
3. Spam. Everybody is complaining about how much spam Google, Yahoo, and MSN have in their results, and it is getting worse. All of the big engines have big departments that do nothing but fight spam. Not meaningfully impacted by NLP.
Now think about what Powerset is shipping as their example: a tiny demo index that does not contain spam and does not require navigation searches so that they don’t have to deal with 1-3 (which, btw will impact the vast majority of searches consumers are generating). As they scale their index, no matter how terrific the NLP relevance is, it will be overwhelmed by these factors, and unless they somehow manage to duplicate 1-3, not a chance that they will even get close in getting the right results for consumers compared to the big engines.
They very well may have a brilliant product but I can’t get past that big weird ass logo on their home page.
http://www.imageco.com
Nanny McPhee
I’ve been in the search business before at one of the big four, but am out of the space with my current job. I still love to stay connected to it. I am in the beta of all the usual suspects (Radar Networks, Hakia, Powerset, True Knowledge, Lexxe, et al), and from a hands on perspective, this is the most interesting play I have seen among the folk in this segment. Instead of comment wars, why not spend a day using the different products and come back with detailed feedback? I will be the first to admit what I use at Powerlabs in imperfect and not a 1.0 consumer offering, but it is actually interesting (and starts breaking the blue link paradigm), and useful so far in rubbing against fact bases with wikipedia and freebase.
Wow. While I am not that much of a techie, it takes only a very basic understanding of NLP to know that Powerset has pretty close to nothing of value.
The hype is incredible given the lack of substance. If Dave Wehner can get this company sold in its current state for $100M then he might be the greatest iBanker in history.
@27 I know exactly what i am talking about.
You wrote correctly about freshnes / index size problem.
When your software works fine and you realise that some of your thousends servers have hardware issues that affect the way your software works it’s hard.
But ranking the sites when you know how SE-Spammers act is easy. The problem with google results is that SE-Spammers target their index and their algorithm. Choose different methods then google and your results will be better untill you get popular and get targetted.
Hey, Tim G
I have stealth mode search engine. How much does cost to design logo & webpage?
I want something better than VC funded competitors.
If they can’t use their contextual search engine on more than 2 carefully selected domains, they have no technology to sell.
$100 million offer from Microsoft has to be a false rumor.
I really believe that Powerset can defeat Google. Yes I said it. If Powerset can live up to its hype with its general search engine, then watch out internet. This underated company could make a huge splash on the internet scence and grow faster than any internet company that we have scene since the start of the dotcom boom.
Well thanks to this blog I have been made to look like a genius. After all you all are the experts.
many moons ago when I predicted Google stock will drop by half from $800 to about $400 the guys who i told looked at me as if I was and idiot. Of course there was a massive stock slide if I may recall.
What made it sweeter was the actual value of my prediction for a take over bid without even hearing about such a bid on non blog.
Well what can I say. Cuill + Powerset + X + Y + Z = Web3.0 = Yahoo R.I.P = Google at US$225 within 2 years.
Hey I can afford to make such outlandish statements, I am not a techi or an expert you all are.
Oh Steve, if you recall in my e-mail. Yahoo is toast with or without Microsoft. So save your marbles.
Google has all the right people to launch their own NLP search product. They wouldn’t have to hire anyone new or buy a company. The reason they haven’t done this is that Powersets products are lame. They only work in the narrow domain of Wikipedia articles, which have very predictable markup that can easily be parsed. Powerset’s current technology will fail on the web. Period.
Powerset may not have much power, but the little swing it will carry once mixed the right way with the right ingredients can spell doom for many. Actually it may be sooner than you think.
If somebody going to buy it , they might as well sell it. Google is still the king no matter what advertising they do..Natural language search engine don’t click in the media, it will be a long time before you can match or kill Google.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
One have think beyond technology when dealing with the web. Sounds unusual does it not?
There is just…no…way.
Cuill
Google’s Evil twin
You guys are ridiculous. Barney is spreading this rumor to hype PS before the launch. Sure, he’s talked to MS — lots of companies ‘talk’, to lots of other companies, all the time. Talking and 100M are very different things. ‘We talked, no comment’ is not a lie. The one thing Barney is good at is generating hype. Which is pretty good, one must admit, most CS PhDs wish they could hype their stuff at 1/100 his level…
@Michael:
‘The real issue with scaling to the entire web is ranking of results, which you just can’t test on such a small scale. Ranking certainly isn’t trivial. But if they were able to get ranking right, Powerset would be the search engine I use every day.’
No, the actual issue is just about plain performance. According to some previous statements, Powerset’s software needed about one second to index a single sentence. No matter which hardware they used back then, this is way too slow for scaling to the entire web.
Maybe, their algorithms improved in the meantime. However, the point is that their user experience better be as breathtaking as described by you, because as for scaling their crawler / indexer they will always lose against the major competitors.
Would love to have more solid reporting on this alleged bidding war? What evidence do we have that this is not more Powerset hype? It smells like the ‘let’s see if we can get our VC bacon back’ trick.
It is pretty simple if the decision is in fact true. If you do have a transformative product then of course you don’t sell. Launch and you are worth 10X more. That has been proven to be the case time ans time again. If you don’t and you can pass due diligence muster and there is a real bona fide deal grab it!
By the way, Peter Norvig (was Dir of search quality at Google and now has some other title) has talked a lot about nlp and Google. Just Google it. Most of the time he is negative on it even though he is much more of an expert than anyone at Powerset. He was Barney’s boss at NASA and has hired more nlp machine and machine learning experts than any other company (orders of magnitude of powersets brain trust). So, don’t be surprise if Google already uses some nlp or will be doing so soon.
Powerset, keep the stache’s going… Hold out until you can sell or deliver on the PR expectations.
Parse this
Powerset searches with the Language of Nature they do. Results from the meaning of your words they find. Seeking “Plants that are not Vegetables” yields Fruits and Legumes, not mis-placed pages with those words upon them. MMMM
Every page in Wiki is encyclopedic, so the language tends to follow regular word order, but the Internet doesn’t follow those rules, so the blog run by Yoda doesn’t get indexed the right way by a Powerset.
My full response is at:
http://www.takingthebridge.com.....ould-sell/
They should sell because their search engine is horrible. I’ve seen their Preview/beta (whatever it is) and it provides results worse than google on Wikipedia site.
Sel guys… just sell. Let MS grab another dud. MS will never get this junk working.
Powerset have terrible growth. Not even public hype. Only one person that use powerset is barney pell. No one else. No even the world.
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....werset.com
Powerset reminds me another edgeio.com and XFL.
> Powerset reminds me another edgeio.com
thats harsh
!