It's been hyped from here to the back of beyond, but the search engine Powerset - dubbed a "Google killer" by all manner of media pundits - is now live... at least partially.
The first iteration of Powerset, years in the making, doesn't index the web - just Wikipedia.
It's a very limited rollout for the people behind the site, which uses natural language understanding to provide answers to complex search queries. The Powerset team, including former Nasa scientist Barney Pell (who was replaced as CEO) and PayPal/Facebook backer Peter Thiel (the subject of our now infamous Tom Hodgkinson diatribe), have been working away for years on their attempt at reworking the search engine - and have opted for natural language understanding for their spin on search.
According to the San Jose Mercury News:
"This is just to whet users' appetites for more and more," said co-founder Barney Pell, a former research scientist at NASA and SRI International.
Unlike Google, which indexes the world's Web sites at lightning speed by doing a quick and dirty analysis of key characteristics, Powerset painstakingly "reads" every sentence on every Web page and looks for meaning.
This approach requires a huge amount of computing power - it can take a single microprocessor as much as 20 seconds to analyze a page. But Pell believes the extra effort is worth it for the time it will save human beings.
The idea is to read your query and work out what you're asking the internet, then give you the answer. But will slow and complex ever match a quick and dirty solution?
This limited launch is meant to display the company's power, if not its reach. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so give it a go and tell us - are you excited, or disappointed?
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