The ab|inventio Gazette

You don’t want to miss this.

Looked for the name of the investment banker who sold Powerset yesterday. Whozat yielded his name on the first page of search results. Neither Google nor Powerset did –you’d think someone at Powerset would have written a Wikipedia article about him after the $100MM price tag he got them.

–Alex

My friend Philippe kindly alerted me to the fact that Argentina would play Brazil in the Olympics soccer semifinal yesterday. So I did a whole bunch of web searches to try to find out if it was being shown anywhere in L.A., in which channel and when. The searches were fruitless –every search engine I tried gave no good results. Then when the game was over, I tried to find a video of it online. After looking through lots of “top-ranked” videos on the topic, I found none. Still a lot of work left to do in search.

–Alex

P.S. Argentina beat Brazil 3-0, earning its place in the final to defend its gold medallist status.

Check out this diva’s homage to Whozat. Thanks!!!

–Alex

As Yahoo’s Santa Monica offices dealt with an hour-long power outage and cell phones turned useless all day across Southern California, abInventio’s websites remained fully operational through the 5.4-magnitude earthquake. None of our data centers serving Whozat, HoundWire, REPcloud and QLess in Altadena, Santa Monica or Texas were affected. Indeed, HoundWire was among the first news organizations to report the earthquake, within a half hour of the event.

–Alex

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

Whozat entered the BOSS program this week to start working with Yahoo to deliver semantic, machine-vision aided, interactive, next-generation search results. We are proud to be working with Yahoo, and look forward to extending our partnership to other leading search engines in the future.

–Alex

That’s what Joy wrote to us after discovering Whozat.

I just searched for the Austrian Consulate in Los Angeles in Google, and got this:

For those of you confused, Austria is in Europe, Australia in the Pacific Ocean.

The same search in Whozat yields, well, the Austrian consulate in Los Angeles –in addition to the Austrian embassy in the USA and a number of semantically related links.

–Alex

“Try searching for yourself or for a friend, you may surprised by what you may find”, writes Jacob Morgan of J Morgan Marketing. ”

“Whozat?” also has a few extra form fields you can use to help narrow your search down even further.  These form fields allow you to enter in a particular location, sex, (male/female), and age.

This little extra step of refining the results really allows you to get accurate search results for people.”Read his full review here.

Thanks for the review, Jacob!

–Alex