Powerset Launches Wikipedia Search

Semantic search engine Powerset, which we've written about here before, has just launched its initial release. The current release is limited to indexing Wikipedia content, but it provides a great showcase for their technology and user experience.

For example, my search for "Alexander the Great" provided the following results page:

Here's the interesting part: If you look at the corresponding article in Wikipedia, you see a long text article, with biographical details in a table on the right. The Powerset results page adds to this by pulling out a great deal more data (listed as "Factz" in the results page) - such as territories conquered, cities founded and armies defeated. The Powerset engine has extracted this information from article.

Early news of this release comes from Charles Knight, of the Alt Search Engines blog, who has a comprehensive post about the latest release. More news is available on TechCrunch.

Which brings us to the next question of interest: how will Google respond?

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