Powerset

A big thanks to everyone who participated in our Factz contest to win a Powerset t-shirt! It was a lot of fun to see people’s motivation and creativity in finding Factz. Here are some of our favorite blog posts.

Megha Agrawal wrote an excellent post about researching "at the speed of light." She concluded his blog post by saying, “So if you’re having a class assignment due by tomorrow and you don’t have time to thoroughly read and understand the topic you can make use of the Powerset Factz that are fun to discover about a particular subject.”

Christian Straub found answers to questions such as Who killed jfk? This query is a great example of how Factz can directly answer a question, as well as provide further reading on a topic. Christian jokingly lamented that, “Powerset has actually managed to get me to waste more time (or educate myself more?) on Wikipedia. Instead of clicking at random links in random articles (which is still awesome by the way), you can type a subject or a question or a relation, and Powerset will often find some interesting factoids relating them."

Yuanjie Liu from China wrote a great post that included the query What did Thomas Edison invent? These Factz provide insights on Thomas Edison and the light bulb, pulling relevant Factz triples from articles such as “Timeline of electricity,” “Precursors of film,” and “Edisonian approach.”

In his blog, Visish Srinivasan used a query related to his research: epigenetic. The results from Factz found the relation between epigenetic and senescence. He wrote, “Impressively enough, clicking on that actually mentions exactly what I’ll be researching - epigenetic phenomenon and their relation to the causes of senescence.”

Steven P. Sanderson was especially ambitious and had a multitude of Factz queries on his blog. Our favorite was what does Microsoft own? which returns an easy to scan list of information strewn throughout Wikipedia.

Other Factz posts include: Caitlin Bales, Catherine H van Zuylen, Anand Kishore, James Grimes, Jr., Matt McMahon, Sandeep Sripada, Raveesh Meena, Nitin Karandikar , Mardav Wala, Becca Schonberg, Darren Louie, Richard Bradshaw, Boyan Yurukov, Rajesh Balakrishnan, eric, Dan Tam, Patrick Traughber, Vilson Vieira

For those of you that didn’t get a t-shirt but still want one, we’ll probably run another contest like this in the future, so stay tuned.

Powerset has always been a fan of the iPhone.  Over a third of the company owns an iPhone (roughly equivalent to the number of PhDs working here) and a handful took the afternoon off on the day of the iPhone launch to make all of their friends jealous.

With that many iPhones ringing around the office, it was kind of embarrassing to demonstrate a handicapped Powerset mobile search product.  Therefore, after launch, one of our first major projects was to create an iPhone-friendly version of our search & browse experience for Wikipedia.  If you’ve got an iPhone, just go to www.powerset.com and it will work automatically.

The iPhone web app includes all of the functionality that Powerset features on the Web site, but is designed to be easy to use on your iPhone.  We think that Powerset is currently the best way to search and read Wikipedia on your iPhone. 

For searching Wikipedia, you can enter a topic, phrase, or question and get back Powerset results.  For simple Factz-style questions (see our blog contest about Factz for more details), Powerset will return the list that we derived from sentences across Wikipedia article.  Side note: Dr. Bruce Horn, one of the original developers on the Macintosh and creator of the Macintosh Finder (as expressed by what did bruce horn write on Powerset), is manager of Powerset’s Semantic Search Platform.  Also, when we get an answer from Freebase, we’ll display those results.  And, we’ll show regular search results for any query, whether it’s a keyword query or a natural-language style query.

Once you click on a search result, you will go to the Powerset-enhanced Wikipedia articles.  You can either browse the article or use the Outline to navigate directly to the section you want.

The Factz summary gives you an easy-to-read list of all of the Factz that Powerset was able to derive from the article, which often reads like a Cliff’s Note’s summary.  This is great if you’re on the go and looking to quickly scan the information in the article.

The search-within-the-page brings semantic search into the results page.  You can search for keywords or you can search for questions, e.g. “who stole pat’s rocket” on the Achewood page.

We’re really excited about this release and hope that, if you’re an iPhone user, you’ll use Powerset next time you need to look up something while you’re cheating at trivia night at your local bar, get details when you’re uncertain about some new fruit at Whole Foods, or just trying to convince your friends that you really do know the right answer.

If you’d like more information or an interview, drop us an e-mail at press@powerset.com.  If you have suggestions, join Powerlabs and make feature requests for the iPhone app.

Update: We created a quick demo video, for the luddites who don’t have iPhones.

Powerset iPhone Web App Demo from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

Powerset provides a natural language interface to Freebase data.  For example, the following questions and phrases return results from Freebase: neoclassical painters, george w. bush’s wife, films starring brad pitt, and who starred in frasier.

Powerset will be showing off our Freebase integration at the next Freebase User Group Meeting on Tuesday, June 17.  If you’re a current user of Freebase, want to integrate Freebase into your product, or just want to check out cool Freebase applications, then sign up on their Upcoming.org page and join us.

As an added bonus, Freebase will be giving out their coveted Freebase ringer tees to all attendees.

Now that Summer is here, you need a hip, snazzy Club Powerset t-shirt!

Here’s the deal: look for something cool, unique, interesting or surprising in the Factz section of Powerset.  Write a blog post with a link to the search, an explantion of what’s cool, and maybe even a screenshot.  If you’re feeling motivated, you can post a few searches to increase your chances.  On Friday, June 20, Powerset will post links to the best blog posts and send each of those users a Club Powerset t-shirt (we’ll limit the number of t-shirts we give away to the double digits).  How easy is that?

The goal is to find queries that show off Powerset’s Factz, which are aggregated from across Wikipedia articles to summarize a topic.  When you click a word in Factz, Powerset will show you the sentence it was derived from.  Note that oftentimes, Factz come from Wikipedia articles that are different from the topic you were searching for.  Try a famous person like Jon Stewart, a company like Atari, or even just a noun like cat.  By default, Powerset shows the top three relations, but clicking the "More" button on the bottom will expand to all of the Factz that Powerset found.

Sometimes you can find fun Factz on just a topical query.  But, you can also use Factz to generate lists. {warning: brief grammar lesson follows!}  Notice that all Factz are in a subject-verb-object format called "triples".  You’ll get Factz if you ask a simple question in the forms:

• whom/what do [subject] [verb] (try what do italians eat or what did the FDA ban)
• who what [verb] [object] (try who beheaded charles i or who climbed mount everest)
• [name] and [name] (try cat and mouse or man and woman)

You can often use a simple topical query to guess what questions will have good answers.  For example, a query for Leibniz has a number of things that he invented.  Therefore, the query What did Leibniz invent, turns out to be an excellent Factz query.  Try this for any topic you find interesting if you’re not sure what questions to ask.

To get in the running for a Club Powerset t-shirt, leave a comment in the blog and send us an e-mail at feedback@powerset.com with “Screenshots” in the title, your address, and the size of t-shirt you want. If you post your screenshot to Flickr, tag it with powersetscreenshots.

We look forward to a few surprises, a few a-has, and hopefully a lot of laughs.