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.