PowerSet Goes Beta

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 Posted in startups |

I've talked about PowerSet before. Yesterday it went into public beta. Currently, it only crawls Wikipedia and performance isn't that great (compared to Google), but surely it will improve over time. BusinessWeek also has a nice summary of PowerSet if ...

Did Microsoft Really Want to Acquire Yahoo!?

Sunday, May 4th, 2008 Posted in strategy |

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day in Denver. I spent several hours finishing Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry. A fantastic read that I highly recommend. The book is a ...

Thoughts on Search, Human Involvement, and Stumpedia

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 Posted in web technology |

I have had many conversations lately about search including a few blog posts (here and here). To summarize the conversations, I have generally expressed a somewhat strong distaste for the current state of search. I loathe that search is ...

PowerSet & Broken Search

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 Posted in web technology |

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 ...

The Search Problem

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 Posted in web technology |

Yesterday Brad Feld of the Foundry Group posted an article by Loic Le Meur discussing the trouble with the disjointed nature of the thousands of social services that are now in use globally. I see compelling parallels between the new social ...