Powerset, Inc. is licensing PARC’s “natural language technology” and want’s to use it for a new search engine. The basic idea is to make searching processes easier by using quite natural language instead of special “search language” with keywords exclusions and so on. The explicit target of Powerset is to rival Google one day.
There are two big questions concerning this story:
- What are the benefits of natural language search? Is it really easier to type “I’ve heard that Powerset want’s to market a new search engine using a technology of PARC. What’s it about?” than “powerset parc search”?
- Goolge is world’s largest media company and searching is it’s core competence. So we can assume that a lot of experts are researching inton this issue. Why haven’t they already launched a prototype if natural language search can be profitable?
In my view there are only two possible future scenarios: Powerset’s success will be moderate or otherwise Google will buy it.
