TechYob

Im a believer in the value of natural language search, and the ability and promise of a cool californian company called Powerset to deliver a unique search experience for its users.  It was only last year that Dr Raymond Wong, one of Australia’s bright stars in data mining and information science, opened my eyes to the opportunity of any company that re-wrote the indexing strategy that is both Google’s strength and weakness. 

My fear is that Powerset’s genius will be un-done by its PR strategy. 

I remember the first day I discovered Google;  it was introduced to me by a close friend Simon Jolly, now head of Engineering for NetPriva, and I never looked back.  I had no expectations to disappoint.  Actually in retrospect Google had it easy in that the existing search players Yahoo and Altavista had conditioned us on what was a broken search experience.

The other advantage that Google had was that it was able to release its search engine to the public without the pressure to be an overnight success.  The only company in the world that pulls off a first time product launch is Apple.  Contrary to popular belief, PageRank didnt solve search.  It was the opportunity to test drive on millions and millions of queries without the pressure of a mainstream public launch that was a winning stroke for GOOG. 

By deliberately feeding the hype engine, Powerset is setting itself a hurdle that its incumbent never had to jump.  Instead of just learning on the job, Powerset now has to deliver with the execution of an iPhone but without the tolerance for failure.