Powerset

Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago and we’ve already completed our first few integration projects: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using our Factz engine . 

These projects were meant to be achievable in 30 days and act as a first collaboration between the Live Search and Powerset teams.  We have plans for deeper integration in the future, but these projects gave us an opportunity to get to know our colleagues up in Redmond and drive greater understanding of our respective technologies.  All of these projects are currently being “flighted” on Live Search, which means that they are being shown only to a small percentage of users (if you get one, consider yourself lucky!).  Once we’ve gotten data back from the tests, we’ll plan next steps and decide what features will eventually roll into the product.

The first project was to expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows Answers.  Queries like San Francisco weather, MSFT, and Banff national park already produce answers.  Also, many celebrities from abba to frank zappa and even bloggers from seth godin to leo laporte show up with xRank biographies.  But, many topical queries do not show Answers today such as  musicians, albums, films, etc. For this experiment, we selected some of these categories and will return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers we show in Powerset, using data from Freebase.  Eventually, we hope to give Answers for even more topics.
 
 

The second project was to use Powerset’s semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles.  Since Wikipedia articles show up in a large percentage of Live Search queries, it’s important that the captions are top notch.  These changes are transparent to the end user, but we’ll be able to analyze the Powerset captions versus the Live Search captions to see which perform better.



The third project is also transparent.  We used Powerset’s Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries.



We also started to use some of Live Search’s technology on the Powerset side.  You’ll notice that we now have “related articles” on Powerset enhanced Wikipedia articles.  We’re getting these directly from Live Search.

 

Powerset is excited that we’re already able to make improvements to Live Search.  Expect more announcements in the coming months, both of Powerset’s technology integrated into Live Search and of enhancements to Powerset.com.

-    Dr. Scott Prevost, Principal Development Manager, Powerset
-    Dr. Hugh Williams, Partner Development Manager, Live Search