Tag Archives: search

Powerset

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I’ve been playing around with Powerset, a new Semantic Search Engine, which uses natural language search technology that is based on patents licensed exclusively from Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox) and its own proprietary indexing.

Instead of being limited to keywords, Powerset allows you to enter keywords, phrases, or questions. Instead of just showing you a list of blue links, Powerset gives you more accurate search results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles.

I have to confess I am very impressed with it – I used it for a few hours late last night to help find some references for a blog piece I’m writing and loved the way it seemed to understand the concepts I was asking about rather than giving me matches based on keywords. Currently it only searches Wikipedia but does also provide results from Freebase as well. I really find the MiniViewer useful, it allows you to view a short result snippet presented on the results screen within the other original context it was extracted from, this also makes the search results feel interactive.

Here’s the demonstration video that explains how Powerset is different using some cool examples:


Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

I’m really interesting in seeing where Powerset goes next …

Finding Faces with Live Search

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The images search on www.live.com recently released a new feature that makes it easier to search for specific kinds of images. You can now search for portraits, faces and black and white images by adding some simple filters to queries.

For example if I wanted to search for specific kinds of images of my friend Alan I would use the following queries:

The search also incorporates the new Related People feature which is also quite interesting … for example try this image search:

 I’m not sure what heuristic it uses to relate people together but I find it quite an interesting discovery tool. Try it out for yourselves.

Microsoft launches Tafiti

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If you haven’t tried it yet check out Microsoft’s experimental new search front end Tafiti – http://www.tafiti.com.

It’s based on Microsoft’s new SilverLight technology, their competitor to Flash. It uses a cool desktop metaphor where you can spin through different kinds of results, drag and drop them into piles which you can label and share with your friends.

Although it might seem gimmicky and not particularly useful at first glance, it is actually quite innovative and and a lot of fun to use. It’s a great showcase for SilverLight but it’s interesting to contrast how Apple are doing a lot of work in bringing metaphors such as stacks to the desktop UI, and Microsoft seem to be focussing on Search and the Web.

Try it out for yourselves! I think it’s awesome.

Google New Experimental Search Features

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http://www.google.com/experimental/

Google have come up with a set of experimental new search features aimed at improving the search experience. I’ve been playing with them and have to admit they are really cool!

The first is the ability to view search results on a timeline or on a map. Google do this by extracting dates and locations from the search results so that the information can be viewed in a different way.

For example a search for Olympics, and specifying a map view plots the locations the event has been held in on a map. Whilst searching for information on the civil rights movement, and specifying a timeline view will highlight key dates and events on a timeline.

The next new feature, is the enabling of keyboard shortcuts to navigate around search results. After initially using this, I can’t stop! A small arrow is rendered next to a search result, pressing the ‘J’ key moves to the next results, whilst pressing ‘K’ moves to the previous. You can open a search result by pressing ‘O’ or just hitting enter. You can also press ‘/’ to have the cursor jumpt to the search box, whilst ‘ESC’ moves the cursor out of the search box. Try it for yourselves here, it’s really easy to use and if your like and means you dont need to use a mouse at all to navigate around search results.

Another new feature is the addition of facets to search results, ( which Google oddly refer to as left hand navigation? ). Basically the left hand pane lists a set of groupings, for example content type, patents, products, news etc. The left hand pane also list’s a set of related searches. Together both these bits of information allow you to narrow your search, in order to find whatever it is your looking for, hopefully, quicker. This feature is also available on the right hand side of the screen.

It’s encouraging to see that Google are trying very hard to improve search, not only by providing mechanisms that should enable ordinary users to get to the content they are interested in faster, but they are also thinking about how to improve the experience. The keyboard shortcuts, whilst on the face of it might look simple, actually increases your productivity because you don’t need to interact with a mouse at all.

I’m impressed.