AI search Powerset to launch next month
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Blog: Powerset CEO Barney Pell will demonstrate the technology called Powerlabs next week while speaking at the Singularity Summit on artificial intelligence and the "future of humanity."
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Also: Microsoft plans new BizTalk release for this year. [News.com Extra]
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Powerset, an ambitious start-up  that aims to let people search the Web using conversational  speech instead of just keywords, began opening up its site on  Monday for public testing of the technology.
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A new feature called AskEraser will let users perform anonymous searches.
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Microsoft will introduce its long-awaited Internet search engine on Thursday, a person knowledgeable about the announcement said.
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The &quot;in&quot; item for big four of the search industry (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and, Ask Jeeves) is Desktop Search utilities. By early next year, all the major search platforms will/should have a branded, functional
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Microsoft Corp. last week released a preview version of its new Internet search engine. It will be available in its final form early next year.
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Ask Jeeves has launched a beta desktop search application, capping off a very busy year in the desktop search space.
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Ask JeevesÂ will launch a test version of its desktop search tool on Wednesday, following the launch of similar tools by rivals MicrosoftÂ on Monday and GoogleÂ  in October, and ahead of expected entries from America OnlineÂ (AOL) and Yahoo.
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Software giant hopes to challenge Google with new search technology.
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Two months after Internet search leader Google offered a test version of a desktop search tool, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves are all set to follow suit.
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It looks to be all out war. Microsoft has announced the launch date for a test version of desktop search software to rival Google&#39;s beta search application released earlier this month.
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Devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market, giving users the ability to let their mouths do the walking â and the searching.
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(InfoWorld) - Xerox research subsidiary the Palo Alto Research Center has struck a licensing deal with a high-profile startup in the hopes of building a search engine that could one day rival Google. Powerset in San Francisco is developing a search engine based on natural language processing with the help of PARC, which has been working on technology in this area for 30 years, said Powerset founder and CEO Barney Pell. The search engine is expected to go live by the end of the year. Powerset, which has raised $12.5 million in funding from various venture capital firms and angel investors, has been negotiating with PARC to use the technology the research firm developed since September 2005, a mere month after Powerset was launched and a month before the company was incorporated in October, Pell said. The startup even managed to win over top talent from PARC to join its team. Ron Kaplan, who led the PARC team that developed the natural language processing technology Powerset is licensing, is joining the company as its chief technology and scientific officer. In addition to the licenses, Powerset also holds the patents to the technology, Pell said. In return, PARC receives equity in Powerset and royalties on company revenue. Powerset also is funding the natural language processing research team's efforts at PARC. Pell described the difference between how a search engine powered by natural language processing technology and search engines available from Google, Yahoo, and others that depend on keywords work. He said the way many of the top search engines today index Web content is in keywords, but they don't have any idea what those words mean or how they relate to each other. A search engine based on natural language, however, can accept queries written as people normally speak -- such as, "What company did IBM acquire in 1996?" Pell said. The results of the search should directly answer that question without giving a Web user every reference to the words "acquire," "IBM" and "1996" that have been indexed. It's true the major Web search engines such as Google do question-and-answer type searches today, Pell said, but they are still mainly based on keywords. Of course, researchers have been working for three decades to come up with successful natural language processing technology, and it has been no easy task, something that Pell himself acknowledges. "Enabling computers to extract meaning and relationships in text ... is an incredibly hard problem," he said. That said, to assume Powerset's search engine will work without a hitch is not necessarily a safe bet. However, Pell said that there have been recent breakthroughs at PARC in this area, and the software that Powerset has licensed should provide some of the highest-quality natural language processing-based search available. Powerset is not the only company attempting to perfect natural language processing-based Web search. Hakia also is developing a search engine based on natural language processing. A beta of that engine can be found here. The Brainboost search engine, which is now a part of Answers.com, also is based on natural language processing.
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Can search term data predict the next American Idol?
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The Associated Press this morning hailed a new Xerox innovation that aims to take search engine indexing capabilities "to the next level," with a public unveiling of a semantic networking tool it plans to integrate into its FactSpotter legal document search system. It's being described as the next stage in textual indexing development, and the culmination of a four-year project at Xerox's European research center in Grenoble, France.
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An artificial intelligence company next month will unveil plans for a program that will help its AI software "learn" by interacting with humans in virtual worlds.