edit: Jason has written a similar article about Powerset and what he would do as CEO over at calcanis.com. I thoroughly recommend the read!

The search engine space hasn’t had many new large entrants in the past few years (if you exclude Microsoft’s no-brainer of Live Search) but now there seems to be a slew of new contenders. Mahalo (one of Jason Calacanis’ projects that I’ve posted about a few times),  and now Powerset; an interesting project that claims to use natural language semantics to interpret your search question and provide fast and accurate results.

Currently this is limited by its source material (wikipedia), and so the searches may only be factual in nature, so let’s take a look and figure out how well this thing does against Google (and for novelty), Mahalo.

So… some search questions. Seeing as Powerset requires factual based questions, to be fair, all will be factual in nature.

Aims:

1. How long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

3. How many different types of Swallow are there?

4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

I think that these represent a pretty good spread of questions over various topics. Now… to see how they all sum up!

1. How Long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

Google: Varying the search text, between the first and third results contain the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The very first result contains the answer (also highlighted).

Mahalo: Typing ‘Queen Victoria’ returns a page with the answer in the nice Guide Note box in the corner. Another win: all three seem pretty good with history!

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2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result contains the answer highlighted.

Mahalo: Not indexed on Mahalo… does give Google results though so see above.

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3. How many different types of swallow are there?

Google: Fourth result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result does contain the answer, although not obviously and it does not appear in the summary text.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic, however again, the Google results yielded the same as above.

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4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: I couldn’t actually find the answer at all. I’m sure that it was in one of the pages somewhere, but not in any summary text on the first few pages of results, or ‘obviously’ within any of the first results.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic but gave good Google results.

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Okay, so how did Powersets do? Not bad at all.

I was actually pleasantly surprised; I had set out to show that it was not even as good as Google, but it seemed to pretty much equal it most of the time. With the added plus that you can type the search in natural language. Its natural language support seems limited to simple sentences with no logic (e.g. and, not…) (at least from what I could tell), but it could seem easier for a novice.

However, despite offering a useful service; I don’t see where it would fit in to my (or anyone’s?) life. It’s not a complete search engine… I couldn’t use this as my home page. I couldn’t rely on it for day to day searching. AND… honestly, if I’m looking for encyclopaedic content, why not just go to Wikipedia.org?

The only way I can imagine using this is if they say made a Sidebar gadget or widget out of it, that I could just type my search in and away I go, rather than remember another search site when Google works just as well.

What I did end up learning here though, is that Mahalo is *actually* pretty good. It seems to crash my Firefox instantly :(, I don’t know if that’s the fault of FF3B5 or the site, or (quite likely) Flash Player (don’t know if they use any flash), but it has crippled my system of late, so you’ll notice the Mahalo pics are in IE, but I really like it.

Mahalo seems to have gotten it right… I will seriously consider swapping over to using Mahalo as a home page because it accepts the fact that their own data is limited. Mahalo seems to focus more on creating its own articles in the areas of popular culture, trivia, how tos etc… This is really useful content that doesn’t really exist in a consolidated manner anywhere else. But it then provides you with outside links for things that it doesn’t have. So essentially you get added value, and don’t lose anything from what you had before.

Okay, this is getting long, but… Powersets? Does it work? Yes. Is it new? I hope not; I really thought we were at this stage a few years ago (http://www.lexxe.com http://www.msdewey.com)

Chris

I have just accepted receipt of a second DELL moniter.

I suppose I’ve been living in the past for the last year with only one moniter on my desk but now, having two… I can see why people say that two is the way forward. The only problem is I don’t know how I’m going to go about not buying a third!

It’s so much easier to do two things at once; the ability to watch an episode of a TV show, or chat on IM while working on the other screen is invaluable (saves switching) and if you’re copying data from program-to-program etc… it speeds things up no end!

In synopsis; if there’s currently one moniter on your desk; get to dell.com and buy another while I take a picture to update the blog header!

Chris

Firstly I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who reads that’s downloaded and used Giggle; the volume of feedback has been phenomenal and in the past week has helped to make Giggle become a lot faster, smoother and generally better! :).

Today’s quite an exciting day for us; we got our first press coverage! Giggle was featured over at Neowin (here) which has resulted in a huge number of new users for us (so thank you Neowin!), and also prompted a few reviews dotted up.

Thanks to Martin of at ghacks.net who posted a review (here); we’ll be sure to let you know when we secure deals with US ticket vendors; it’s in the works… :).

I’ll keep updating this with the rest of our press coverage; thanks so much for checking Giggle out and I hope you love it as much as we do!!

We have a *long* list of features that’ll be implimented in Giggle in the coming months so.. watch this space!!

Chris

Digg Giggle!

You may have all noticed that I’ve been a little quiet recently, and I’ve been trying to not talk about this project too much before we actually do any sort of launch.

I’ve been working on a project called ‘Giggle’. Giggle is a tool to recommend you new music based on what you listen to now, and data from every other user on our service. With any luck it can quickly help you find new music that’s tailored to you in a similar way to a friend recommending an artist to you.

It will also tell you when your favourite artists are performing and local gigs that you may like based on your music profile.

Giggle’s now open for testing and we need as many as we can get! If you want to get onboard with Giggle early, go over to www.gigglemusic.com, tell all of your friends and soon we can all be enjoying a diverse range of new music!

This is an early release, so be patient with us; we’re working really hard to try to make Giggle everything that we started out to create but it takes time; with your help we can get there and fill the whole that the ‘death of radio’ has left!

Enjoy,

Chris

Giggle Music Screenshot1 Screenshot2 Screenshot3

Someone today said to me…

“…a Zillion is 1 followed by a Katrillion zeros…”

I thought that was funny!

On an unrelated note, I got my iPhone today :). Oh god is it good… loads more soon, check out my twitter and flickr for more regular posts… more iPhone-native
Chris

It would seem that the Python Source Code to the popular game ‘Eve’ has been leaked on the internet.

While apparently downloaders of the Eve Source utilizing torrent links are being banned, there is a MegaUpload link from which I’ve heard no such rumours.

You can find it over at: REMOVED
(hit up your favourite torrent site if you’re feeling brave)

Remember; you heard it here first! Unless CCP is asking!

Chris

Jason Calacanis is giving away a dash GPS on his uStream. For a chance to win… come on over!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jason-calacanis

Chris

It seems with the loss of Veronica Belmont that Mahalo Daily is in search of a new presenter to run it’s daily ‘interest’ show. Although in true ‘Calacanis’ style, they’re not just interviewing; they’re creating a full-blown web2.0 event out of it - aptly named ‘Mahalo Idol’.

Auditionees are invited to come to the Mahalo HQ to complete their audition, however for people outside of LA, there is the option to make a 1 minute mini-clip of a Mahalo-style episode. This should create a barrage of interesting (and amusing) content for us viewers and apparently even the auditions themselves will be streamed live.

So, if you’re female and think you’re up to the challenge of becoming a Veronica replacement, pop over to Mahalo Idol and try your hand at filling her formidable boots!

Chris

DELL have a sale on monitors here in the UK and so I’m very tempted to go ahead and take advantage of this :).

Here’s the problem… I’m not sure whether to go for dual monitors, or one big one. I have a 22″ DELL at the moment, so it’s either get another 22″ and have duals, or get the 27″ and sell the 22″ (at least partially because different sized screens can look a little stupid beside one-another, but mainly because being a student…).

So.. anybody have any opinions? I suppose it’s mostly coding / writing that I’ll be doing…

Let me know!

Chris

Just a little humorous message that made me laugh today. I was updating my picture on Twitter (as some of you may have already noticed :)), and got the following error message:

As it turns out; it was too large. It just made me laugh that they didn’t put the few lines of code in to check if the file was too big (the file finished uploading from what I could tell) before proceeding and replying with an ambiguous message.

I love twitter too much to have any complaints though.

Long live Twitter and all Twitterites,

Chris