Friday, January 16, 2009

Google v. Powerset v. Live Search



Unfortunately, Microsoft's Live Search engine did not do much better than Powerset for the same search string: 













LiveSearch results

PS: Click on the link to enlarge the snapshot. 




Google v. Powerset search (part III)


Here's a comparison of the two search engines on the search string "flight 1549".
Notice that there is a Wikipedia article about this term. FYI flight 1549 of USAir crashed yesterday over Hudson River luckily with no victims.
Since Powerset only works with wikipedia articles, I thought the term was a good testbed.


The results are pretty disappointing for Powerset. Google yielded the relevant news articles about the flight on the top of its first page. Powerset didn't yield any relevant article in the first page (or as far down as the 5th page; I wouldn't look anywhere deeper than that!):








Powerset results


Ironically, Google listed the "flight 1549" wikipedia article first in its search results effectively beating powerset in its own turf:









Google results