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

Powerset (part II)

So, Microsoft acquired Powerset.
Microsoft always strived to catch up with and eventually challenge Google's search prowess. The acquisition of Powerset is part of this plan.
Powerset have been working off their San Fransisco HQs on a different type of search engine. One that is promised to be "natural language driven".
Here's an example of what the Powerset search can do (according to Powerset):
Instead of searching for book children (ala Google), imagine being able to search for: book for children, book by children, and book about children.
According to Powerset, "there would not be any way for us to properly express the query "books by children" without using the natural language". In other words, a natural language driven search would facilitate the natural tendency of users to phrase their queries using natural language rather than a string of words. So at least from a usability point of view, Powerset search seems pretty well-justified.
But does it work as promised?
I ran a few searches along the lines of books by children on the Powerset search engine and I got results which are at best as mixed as those from Google.
Watch this space for an analysis.

Powerset now part of Microsoft

I think that's big news on many levels. More on this later...