Powerset has started up with the bold goal of creating a search engine capable of understanding human language. Whether the people at Powerset have managed to achieve that goal or not, is just a question of how demanding the user is.

The system manages to understand simple questions like “Who is “ or “What is,” but when moving to more complicated questions like asking it where one can find a species of plants or how one can make a simple device, it fails.

Powerset is a remarkably useful search engine that can be used just on the Wikipedia site and, seen as such, it offers a series of features that make it unique.

It provides very good results for searches about the works of different people in different domains and is able to give information about people involved in certain projects ( for example I was impressed by the results I got for ‘actors in pulp fiction’). The graphical way in which the information is presented and structured is also very appealing.

The search results that are obtained with Powerset are consistently better than the ones obtained with Wikipedia’s own search engine.

Unfortunately, the feature that could have made Powerset more than a search engine, the ‘Factz’ feature is not working properly. 

The results are sometimes incoherent and funny as the system is not able to fully understand the meaning of the words used in human language. However, basic information about a subject is very well extracted, structured and presented.

As an overall, Powerset is probably the coolest way to search information on Wikipedia and, if the developers will improve its human language understanding, it could be the next big leap in web searching technology after Google.