07.01.08
Powerset sold for what?
It looks like Powerset was sold to Microsoft for $100 million. Such acquisitions remind me of all of the crazy buyouts by Yahoo. When Google spent its money on cool loss-leaders, such as Youtube, Yahoo scrambled to find basic technologies to make the company work. This is an admission that Live search is so bad that it views the poor offering by Powerset to be good technology. The worst part of this deal is that Live search is not that bad, but it shows very poor judgment to reach for straws like this.
A recent set of searches confirmed what I already believed, that the technology is not worth much. I searched for myself. I was not on the list. In fact, there is a strange inverse long-tail effect. All I saw was Inspector Gadget and sometimes Playboy video director David Kellogg. Not that I have anything against the film maker, but the average American probably *meant* the director, and that’s all you get. Goodbye long tail, hello average meaning. Then there’s usability.
Clicking on one of the down arrows gives me an infinite swirling Web 2.0 wait signal. It never stopped. Clicking on another down arrow gives me a strange window that can almost be scrolled, but only slowly. It shows you where in a theoretical page layout without pictures where the text might be found if the source page had no pictures. I know they mean to show thumbnails, but they’re not. They are semantically similar. That’s very clever.
The site is slow. Perhaps it’s the Ruby on Rails. The usual search took 4 seconds. You could do 16 Google queries by then.
I tried the query, “manamana muppet video with subtitles in swedish”. Yahoo, Live and Google all showed me the correct video as the first result. Yes, the subtitles were in Swedish. Powerset showed no results. The least this company could do is download and index filler just in case. A helpful link asked, “Did you mean monomania muppet video with subtitles in swedish?” Clicking on this link also gave zero results. There’s just no winning with these people. I thought, maybe a small company like Powserset just does not have the resources. I tried Searchme, and it also gave me the correct result. Ask had the correct result. I think what we have here is the worst web search engine anyone can currently use.
terry chay said,
July 2, 2008 at 5:50 am
Look on the bright side, now that they’ve been sold and are in a quiet period, you won’t have to deal with all their engineers pooing all over your blog saying what an idiot you are for pissing on their religions.
Ric said,
July 13, 2008 at 9:12 am
It’s interesting that you attribute the slowness of powerset to Ruby On Rails.
I don’t think Rails scaling is really as big a problem as some would have us believe. OK, so some big rails sites have had problems (Twitter), but are these problems down to rails, or poor design, or other external factors? I’d bet there are a lot of other sites out there that do comparable traffic to “the big Rails sites” but do so quietly (because they just work).
The ease and speed that you can get something running with rails means that novice developers may be churning out lots of poorly designed, slow apps, thus skewing the distribution of slow sites against Rails’ favour.
Ric said,
July 13, 2008 at 10:17 am
Typo correction: I meant ’skewing’ not ’scewing’!
David Kellogg said,
July 14, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Ric,
I downloaded Rails and ran it. It took 3 seconds for their “Hello World” app to load. Some frameworks are just plain slow. They start out slow, then later you hit the ol’ broken framework problem. You have to break the framework (rewrite it) for it to work on a large scale. After you fix Rails, is it still Rails? Will DHH send you patches for your code? I think not.
There is some place in the world for Easy. If the price is immutable communist-era architecture, I’ll pass.
Strangely, Powerset takes 3 seconds to load a page without any search results, just like my Hello World application. Is their whole site just a fork of the Hello World page? Maybe.