Current Events . Editorial . TechnologyOn May 15, 2008 by Adam

There is a new search engine out there, which if it gets big could spell trouble for Google. Powerset is a “natural language” search engine, which means it knows the meaning of a page (in a way), so you can search in the form of a question. While search engines such as Ask clime to do this, they actually index pages by keywords. If you were to ask the question, “What is Henry the 8th’s birthday?” Google would search for the keywords Henry and birthday. Powerset, on the other hand, knows that you want to know the birthday of Henry the 8th and displays a quick answer. Another great feature of Powerset is that it displays the resulting search page from within there search engine. What this does is give them control of more feature such as an outline of the contents of the page. In side-by-side comparisons of Powerset and Google, Powerset has a slight lead. There is a downside to Powerset, it is in testing, and only searches Wikipedia. Therefore, if you are doing a research project and are using the internet, Powerset may be the way to go. I hope this “natural language” idea catches on and Google adapts it. It could only make surfing the internet that much easier! For more check out powerset’s website.