PowerSet & Broken Search

In response to my post yesterday on search, someone sent me a link to PowerSet. They raised $12.5 million in venture in November 2006 in order to “fix” search through natural language processing. Something Google is no doubt working on as well.

It looks like they are also soliciting human evaluation of search results (from Google/Yahoo! or maybe their own technology) through Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Interesting stuff. Not surprising, but interesting. I think search has to go this way, but I believe it is more of a stop-gap measure vs. solution to the problem. Ultimately, (I hope) search will take a backseat to some other paradigm.