Powerset

Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago and we’ve already completed our first few integration projects: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using our Factz engine . 

These projects were meant to be achievable in 30 days and act as a first collaboration between the Live Search and Powerset teams.  We have plans for deeper integration in the future, but these projects gave us an opportunity to get to know our colleagues up in Redmond and drive greater understanding of our respective technologies.  All of these projects are currently being “flighted” on Live Search, which means that they are being shown only to a small percentage of users (if you get one, consider yourself lucky!).  Once we’ve gotten data back from the tests, we’ll plan next steps and decide what features will eventually roll into the product.

The first project was to expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows Answers.  Queries like San Francisco weather, MSFT, and Banff national park already produce answers.  Also, many celebrities from abba to frank zappa and even bloggers from seth godin to leo laporte show up with xRank biographies.  But, many topical queries do not show Answers today such as  musicians, albums, films, etc. For this experiment, we selected some of these categories and will return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers we show in Powerset, using data from Freebase.  Eventually, we hope to give Answers for even more topics.
 
 

The second project was to use Powerset’s semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles.  Since Wikipedia articles show up in a large percentage of Live Search queries, it’s important that the captions are top notch.  These changes are transparent to the end user, but we’ll be able to analyze the Powerset captions versus the Live Search captions to see which perform better.



The third project is also transparent.  We used Powerset’s Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries.



We also started to use some of Live Search’s technology on the Powerset side.  You’ll notice that we now have “related articles” on Powerset enhanced Wikipedia articles.  We’re getting these directly from Live Search.

 

Powerset is excited that we’re already able to make improvements to Live Search.  Expect more announcements in the coming months, both of Powerset’s technology integrated into Live Search and of enhancements to Powerset.com.

-    Dr. Scott Prevost, Principal Development Manager, Powerset
-    Dr. Hugh Williams, Partner Development Manager, Live Search

Powerset+Microsoft hosted another Lunch 2.0 this year.  We seved delicious food, including sliders and cupcakes.  There were lots of people from many different companies present and we all celebrated the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset with our commerative shot glasses.  Andrew Mager of ZD Net did a great writeup of the event (and he tooks some rockin’ pictures). Terry Chay was there with his huge camera and took a gorgeous set of pics with his fancy camera.  In the photo is Marie Williams of SHIFT, Linda Chan of Powerset, and me.

Expect Powerset+Microsoft Live Search to be hosting more events like this in the future, so subscribe to our blog or check our Twitter feed for details. 

In fact, keep on the lookout for us at TechCrunch50 next week!

Powerset has always suspected that college students love Powerset because it’s such a great way to search and browse Wikipedia content.  However, the only evidence we had was from Powerset parents and glowing feedback e-mails from .edu domains. 

Last week, we conducted a study of 200 college students through Peanut Labs, which confirmed our suspicion: college students are huge fans of Wikipedia.  Here are some of the highlights of the study.

• Though 90% of students have used Wikipedia to complete an assignment, a surprising 73% of students have been explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia.
• Also, about a quarter of students always use Wikipedia when they’re completing an assignment.
• Not surprisingly, the most common use for Wikipedia is initial research.  However, about half of the respondents said that they use Wikipedia as a link to secondary sources of information.  That suggests that the reference section at the bottom of a Wikipedia article is an extremely valuable starting point for many topics.  Also, a third of students say that they’ve used Wikipedia as a primary research source.
• Students find Wikipedia very valuable.  28% of students thought that Wikipedia was a very valuable resource, 49% thought that Wikipedia was relatively important, and 23% thought that Wikipedia was only marginally helpful.

If you have any questions about the survey or you’d like to talk to someone at Powerset about why it’s better to read Wikipedia on Powerset, drop us a note at press@powerset.com.