We have previously noted that Whozat’s semantic engine provides better search results than Google. This is not surprising, as Google is not a semantic engine. But what about the semantic engines that have been raising so much hoopla lately, after Powerset sold to Microsoft for a rumored $100MM? Here is a comparison between Whozat’s, Powerset’s and Hakia’s semantic engines for the first five queries I tried on them:
First I asked the 3 engines “What company has Silvia Moos started?”. Silvia is my mother, and she started two companies: Centralab and Klik Mental Fitness. I picked that search to be fair to Powerset, as I knew that the answer can be found in Wikipedia, and Powerset only searches Wikipedia. Powerset found no results:
Hakia found one of the companies but failed to find the other:
Whozat found both, and put them front and central in the concept cloud:
Then I went for a non people search (did you know that you can use Whozat’s powerful interactive semantic engine for regular, non-people searches simply by using the keyword field and leaving names blank?). I did a search I had done before: Whittier compost (looking for a company called Whittier that sells compost). Powerset did not return anything –not surprisingly, as Wikipedia is a much more limited source of information than the WWW:
Hakia did better, but failed to return the site sought (Whittierfertilizer.com):
Whozat yielded the desired site
I asked Igor for a search in Russian, and he gave me Владимир Ленин. Powerset asked me if I meant something else:
Hakia gave results in Russian, but failed to make the connection to Lenin’s English name, even when asked Who is Владимир Ленин:
Whozat gave the answer, Vladimir Lenin, front and central in the concept cloud:
At that point I did an SQL query, but forgot the command to sort, and used sort by instead of order by. So I searched for the right command in all 3 engines. Powerset had no clue that sort by was related to order by:
Neither did Hakia, at least not on the top 3 results:
Whozat gave the desired result in its first link and in the concept cloud:
A final one: I searched for how to buy a train ticket from Los Angeles to Albuquerque. Powerset gave relevant information, but no link to the Amtrak site (again, limited to the Wikipedia corpus):
Hakia gave lots of links, but not one of them was to Amtrak’s site (not on the 1st page, at least):
Finally, Whozat gave the relevant Amtrak links on results 1, 2 and 3:
Combine that with the fact that Whozat’s semantic engine, unlike Powerset’s, is language-independent…
’nuff said. Lots of work left to do. And it’s only 1 AM.
–Alex
