Search startup hopes to outsmart Google

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Much larger companies — all relying on keyword search — haven’t been able to knock Google from its pedestal. Despite huge investments in search by Yahoo and Microsoft, Google has steadily expanded its market share during the past three years and now processes more than half of all search requests on the Internet.

But even Google’s executives acknowledge that today’s search technology doesn’t do as good a job as it should in divining what people are looking for on the Internet. That’s one reason Google has hired thousands of more workers and spent nearly $2.2 billion on research and development since the end of 2005.

Other search engines have previously promised to understand conversational English with little success.

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In the 1990s, Ask Jeeves was founded on the premise that Internet search requests should be presented as simple questions. It frustrated users with too many irrelevant answers.

After nearly failing in the dot-com bust, the company embraced the keyword approach to search and abandoned its mascot — a cartoon butler named Jeeves — to distance itself from the days it relied on natural-language algorithms. It is now known simply as Ask.com.

More recently, New York-based Hakia has been tackling natural-language search requests without making much of a dent in the market.

Industry analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research is skeptical about Powerset’s prospects, too. She doubts Powerset will be able to comprehend all the different ways that people seeking the same type of information can phrase their questions.

For instance, the questions “What caused the collapse of Enron?” and “What caused the downfall of Enron?” typically produce different search results even though they are essentially asking the same thing, Li said. That’s because computers have trouble recognizing synonyms and other subtle nuances in language.

“Understanding the meaning of many words is difficult without people involved,” she said.

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