Startup lets public test conversational Web search

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Powerset, an ambitious start-up that aims to let people search the Web using conversational speech instead of just keywords, began opening up its site on Monday for public testing of the technology.

Powerset wants to leapfrog the current generation of search services from established providers Google Inc, the market leader, and Yahoo Inc, Google's closest rival.

The 2-year-old company has licensed so-called natural language processing technology, developed over three decades at the legendary Xerox Corp PARC research center in Silicon Valley, to create consumer Web search services.

The goals of natural language search lie at the heart of the classic debate over artificial intelligence and whether computers are capable of understanding human speech.

Many existing uses of natural language search dodge that debate by simply tackling specialized jobs like answering basic customer service queries or making inferences about market sentiment for traders. By trying to create a general-purpose conversational search engine, Powerset is more ambitious.

Its technology reads every sentence on the Web to extract their meaning and build a semantic index of facts that take advantage of the sentences' underlying linguistic structure.

In simple terms, the process is a computer-automated version of parsing sentences into subjects, verbs and objects.

"Search today is like talking to a 2-year-old," Powerset Chief Executive Barney Pell said in a presentation at TechCrunch 40, a product showcase conference. "We actually index facts that occur on a page rather than just words."