Since the launch, Powerset has gone through some changes and was recently bought by Microsoft. The higher-ups at Microsoft were impressed with Powerset’s capabilities and interface innovations, so they teamed up to create a shared vision:

To take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.

Today, Powerset continues to forge ahead with that same goal in mind. Over the last few months, teams from Powerset and Microsoft’s Live Search have collaborated on ideas and designs, and have come up with several projects that will be released over the next 30 days.

These projects were designed with the goal of improving Live Search and Powerset simultaneously by integrating technologies from both search engines. So, without further ado, I would like to introduce three new projects from the collaboration efforts of Powerset and Live Search.

Freebase Answers

This Wikipedia-like project is open to anyone who would like to contribute information; it is “an open, shared database of the world’s information.” Microsoft is utilizing Freebase in order to provide expanded and improved answers for Live Search. A lot of search results today don’t show answers for topical queries such as musicians, albums, and films, but by using Freebase, Live Search is able to return a topic summary that includes links, a result very similar to the Freebase Answers in Powerset.

Improved Wikipedia Captions

Another one of Powerset’s nifty features is that it utilizes semantic technology in order to create improved Wikipedia captions for various articles. And, with the help of Powerset, Live Search will now be able to pull these improved captions into its search result pages that include Wikipedia results.

The Factz Engine

“Factz” from Powerset are concise representations of information that are taken from sentences using three parts; the subject, the relation, and the object. From those parts, a list containing related searches for a set of queries is generated. For example, a search for “chicken recipes” will generate the following list of “Related Searches”:

• Baked Chicken Recipes
• Oven Baked Chicken Recipes
• Easy Chicken Recipes
• Chicken Soup Recipes
• Low Fat Chicken Recipes
• Lemon Chicken Recipe
• Fried Chicken Recipes
• Chicken Pot Pie Recipe

These projects are currently being tested on a small, randomly selected audience, so any search at Live.com could potentially contain one of the above projects as a bonus tidbit of information. Microsoft and Powerset say that they will continue to work together to help improve each other, and I will be here to report the results back to you! So, until then!

I want to take a little time today to summarize just a tiny sampling of the many different search engines that are moving search forward.

Like

Since I am a fan of shopping, and anything that makes it easier to find what I am looking for, I will start with Like.com.

This visual search engine uses both text and images as queries to make shopping more convenient. Simply find a photo of a product that you like or type in a query such as “silver women’s watch”, and the Like.com search engine will return a variety of results similar to the photo or matching the text query from a variety of retailers. That’s just the beginning. You can then highlight the aspects of a wrist watch that you like and Like.com will find other watches with similar styles, shapes, patterns and colors. You can then even further refine with different color, style, or brand options, creating a refreshingly unique shopping experience.

Viewzi

Still sticking with the visual pattern, but moving away from shopping is Viewzi, a visual search engine that has been under wraps since October 2007. With over 10 unique ways that users can view results, this search engine offers a pretty unique way to experience search.

Viewzi offers results in an array of different viewing options. First, a web screenshot view with an actual screenshot of the pages in the search results (from Yahoo! only). Or, a basic photo view displaying results from popular image sharing sites. There is the Video x3 view, curtailing results to display videos from YouTube, Blinkx, and Veoh with tags that allow users to dim out videos they don’t want displayed. Viewzi also offers a standard text view with combined results from Google and Yahoo, as well as a source view, which displays up to 15 results from the top four search engines. There is also the weather view, Amazon book view, celebrity photo view, an MP3 search view, as well as an everyday shopping view.

While Viewzi struggles a little to provide a user friendly atmosphere for casual web searching, it seems as though it has something for everyone.

Powerset

We wrote about Powerset last September, but the search engine just recently launched a limited showcase version to the public. This Powerset version allows users to search against material within Wikipedia using natural language.

Powerset’s goal is to “improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.” And how, do you ask, is Powerset going to do that? Good question! Powerset’s pitch is that a user will get better search results because its technology has read and understood what every word within Wikipedia means.

Powerset says that it looks at each sentence and how the words relate to each other; it “understands” what the queries are and returns results that are better suited for the user. This search engine also offers unique tools in order to get more in-depth results, including query refinements where a search will return different tabs in all the different areas that the query could be related. Powerset also offers straightforward lists of facts that also relate directly to your search query, and outlines of the different results returned. Overall, depending on the query, the array of results can be a bit much; however, it is still a good step in the right direction for new and innovative ways to search.

At the end of the day…

Are any of the above engines on their way to ousting Google, or even Yahoo or Microsoft Live? Probably not. But it is nice to take a little trip away from the standard search methods we have all become quite accustomed to and see what could be coming up down the road.