Powerset

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.