"politicians who died in office"
As a teaser for Powerlabs, we've decided to release a "Query of the Week." Each week, we'll release a screenshot of Powerset search results that demonstrate aspects of our Natural Language technology. When Powerlabs is fully launched, you'll get to play with our search engine yourself, so be sure to sign up today at http://www.powerset.com. The query of this week is. . .
politicians who died in office
For those who think natural language search is just about asking questions, note that this query isn't a question or even a complete sentence. The point is that Powerset respects the natural linguistic structure of the query. The results are appropriately limited to sentences that explicitly refer to politicians dying in office, not just pages that contain the key words.
Note that Powerset also knows that "governors" are types of politicians. This is an example of how Powerset uses ontologies to identify specific examples that match more abstract concepts. In the second result, Powerset actually knows that Daniel MacDonald is a member of the Canadian Parliament, and that MPs are types of politicians.
Look for another query next week!
- Scott Prevost, Director of Product
UPDATE (6/11/07) -- The search results above represent an index built only with Wikipedia articles, not the entire Web. For comparison, try a site-restricted search.
Many of you have left comments on the Powerset blog like “when will u b ready?” essentially asking when users will get to see and play with 
