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Powerset Gives Natural Language Dead Horse Another Beating

I was going to write about Powerset, a search startup / hype machine that keeps generating buzz without delivering anything, but Donna Bogatin delivered far better than I could with this post on their supposed coming out of stealth mode. I keep tabs on search because it's one piece of the information management puzzle, but in enterprise situations it's highly overrated and far more difficult to implement, despite all the "BI & search" hype.

Powerset hyped NL search queries, and now they seem to be hyping web 2.0 search. I'm one of those people who doesn't really believe NL search is that great a thing, for a lot of reasons I won't go into. But the mutating Powerset pitches and buzz marketing leave me clenching my teeth. I'm glad Insider Chatter was there to do the work for me. It's moved up on my weekly reading list. Here's her take on Google.

"The Google $160 billion plus market cap business plan is to CONTROL all the world’s information AND all the personal data of ALL the world’s citizens with the goals of:
1) selling high-priced advertisements against the content owned by others, and
2) data mining the personal information of others for its own corporate advantage."

Good take on Google's constant drumming of the "we're not so evil" mantra while they continue to slide into evil. Curmudgeonly. I like it.

Labels: Google, Powerset, search

Posted by Mark Friday, June 29, 2007 2:51:00 PM | permalink |