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Source:CenterNetworks

Over the weekend, The web was abuzz with discussion about Microsoft considering the acquisition of natural language search company Powerset. Some time ago I had heard a rumor that someone was looking at Powerset, but was relatively uninterested. Hearing that the potential acquirer is Microsoft certainly makes it more interesting, but I have to say the concept leaves me more than a bit incredulous.

From skeptic to user

I became familiar with Powerset’s only competitor, Hakia initially because they are a New York company. I became intrigued with Hakia because several months ago I tried their search engine, and it worked – really well. This was a surprising result for me since I have always been a skeptic regarding all things relating to artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, and other such fuzzy technologies.

At least in the area of natural language processing Hakia that has changed my mind. In fact, it has become common for me to use the Hakia search engine when Google does not deliver sufficient results.

Hakia and Powerset are part of the same general area of natural language search. The idea with both services is that you can actually ask specific questions and get answers. But there are critical differences between Hakia and Powerset. And those differences bring me back to my incredulity at the idea that Microsoft is taking a serious look at Powerset.

Powerset indexes 750 times slower than Hakia!

I have no expertise in natural language processing or semantic search, or any type of full text search for that matter. But as far as I can tell, Hakia’s technology is *far* superior to that of Powerset’s. Why would I say that?

Well first, as I have already said, it works. It is a real live search engine. I use it. I can’t say the same for Powerset. Powerset has yet to show anything but a search engine for Wikipedia. A big part of the reason Powerset doesn’t seem able to offer a real search engine is the fact that according to their own reports, it takes them about 25 seconds to index a page, based on an average of 25 sentences per page. According to Hakia it takes them 1/30th of a second to index a page. Essentially this means that Powerset cannot scale. It is seven hundred fifty times slower than Hakia!

Now you might assume that Powerset is slower because it’s applying some serious, and superior indexing mojo, and therefore what it is doing is much more valuable than what Hakia is doing. But alas that is also not true.

Hakia really knows how to read

Hakia is doing something called “ontological semantics”. What this means is that over the last four years, Hakia has developed an “ontology” for human expression. In layman terms, what this means is that what Hakia does when it indexes a page is to look at each sentence and figure out what the *questions* are that each sentence answers. Any given sentence usually answers 3 or 4 questions. These questions are coded and go into what Hakia calls their Qdex, or question index.

In order to be able to figure out what the relevant questions are for a given sentence, Hakia’s indexer has to literally read the sentence. By “read” I mean it has to understand the actual meaning of the sentence semantically. This is a big deal.

Powerset uses statistics + syntax but can’t actually read

So, while Hakia is actually reading, Powerset, does not actually attempt to understand what sentences mean. It uses a system that parses the syntax of the sentence and guesses matches based on statistics. But this approach means that for questions that do not match previously encountered syntactical patterns, the system will not be able to find answers, even if there are in fact answers in the database.

Powerset benefits from the Silicon Valley echo chamber

Now, if, for a moment, you presume that it is true, or even *possibly* true that Hakia is the superior service and technology, or if you even assume that Hakia is just equivalent to Powerset, why would Powerset be so continuously celebrated while Hakia is overshadowed?

The only answer I can come up with is that the west coast is such an echo chamber that very little sound gets in or out. And so it must be shocking when a New York company develops a technology that seems to beat the pants off something that should be pure Silicon Valley. Just a thought.

In any case, it seems, for the record, worth noting that we have the clear leader in natural language processing and search technology right here. And, as an admitted New York partisan, after a while it does get a little annoying to hear such continued fawning over a west coast company that is very likely, at the end of the day, just another Silicon Valley also-ran.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.

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Source:CenterNetworks

Real estate search engine Trulia is announcing the launch of the Trulia real estate vertical ad network today. Trulia notes that this new ad network will give advertisers access to over 10 million unique visitors per month in their publisher network.

The Trulia Ad Network is launching with a collection of premium online real estate publishers, including Oodle, Homes & Land and The Savvy Source. Existing Trulia advertisers include a diverse group of consumer brands, including Wachovia, Lennar Homes, The Carrier Corp., DirectBuy, Prudential Real Estate, Windermere Real Estate, and ZipRealty.

Trulia provided the following stat from Borrell Associates, "We forecast that real estate ads in newspapers will drop more than one-third by 2011 while online housing ads will rise 60 percent and overtake print for the first time."

Trulia.com self-reports monthly figures of 4.5 million unique visitors with 30 million pageviews and 48.1 million ad impressions per month.

Source:CenterNetworks

Fyrebug offers you a simple way to create a customized flash game with your own photos and music. I found the process of creating a game simple and easy.  Ads are served after each game has completed and the ads are served by MochiAds. Since you will want to play more than once, you will watch the ad.

The game creator is a flash application which walks you through the steps to create the customized game. Fyrebug offers about 40 games that can be customized. For some reason, the boxing game appears to be the most popular game to customize. Games can be shared and embedded. I’ve embedded a sample game below. 

The Fyrebug customized game gallery shows about 100 games that have been created. The games are on the very basic side and probably won’t appeal to high-end gamers. But if you want to beat up your favorite blogger, Fyrebug works perfectly.

Jon at IndieStartups spoke with the Fyrebug founders regarding how he came up with the idea. Co-founder Jonathan Widro said, "My partner and I were working at 4kids Entertainment, and worked closely with flash games. We came up with the idea for Fyrebug, but kids cant upload their own images, so we decided to pursue the idea on our own."

Click here to make your own Fyrebug game

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under games, Reviews, casual games, Fyrebug. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.