I have been hovering on the edge of my seat for a web search engine called Powerset. It is a natural search engine which could be a Google killer if it works. But the company seems to be getting more bad press than good.

This morning I wrote People don't like that they are teasing us with sideshows, holding back the main show for release, perhaps in September. To add insult to injury, the background to the search page is black! Just a couple of obvious issues that have planted seeds of doubt in another start-up company.

No wonder it made people doubt the credibility of these rocket scientists, because someone called Ed, plus a fair few others, got the wrong end of the stick when reading a press release this morning. To clarify in words of one syllable:

The search engine is called Powerset. It isn't released yet.

The pictures above are of Powerlab, which is like a preliminary exercise or run-out for the technology that is going to be used in the finished search engine.

Powerset just launched Powerlab. Got it? Good.

This clarification also means the people who can't stand black can probably be guaranteed that the final search page will not have a background color: 000000.

I had another more cerebral doubt. Is this really a natural and intuitive system for finding info, or are the owners just spinning?

Powerset is intuitive?

Working on the basis that software is a reflection of the owner (Google and the Google owners have a certain snug fit symmetry, I think) what is really going on with Powerset's intuitive and natural search engine?

The About blurb on the CEO's blog site raised my hackles about "intuitive" straight away and made me wonder at what level the intuitive idea starts to permeate the software, because intuitive sure doesn't start with PR from the top! To show you what I mean, join me if you will in reading this:

Powerset is a San Francisco company building a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing. By making search more natural and intuitive, powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results.

I had to read it three times to work out that I understand everything except transformative. Not being a smart ass, but I have a pretty good vocabulary, and sorry, but this member of the masses hasn't got a clue what the hell you are talking about with transformative. However, my intuition tells me it probably isn't that big a deal of a term, probably some cyber geek terminology.

Let's not get too nit picky, though, this is a start up. Just assume the PR wording is a minor geeky detail, of interest to a tiny minority only.

And let's not get too irate at the idea of drip feeding a product launch to the press, and just accept that in this day and age it was a dodgy tactic that is simply unintuitive not illegal.

And let's embrace the idea that something deep in my subconscious tells me black is not welcoming but it still works. And now we know that the black screenshot isn't even the search engine, we can totally relax!

In fact I won't get too hung up on the train of thought that intuitive and About Powerset don't quite gel. I will be kind and assume that the CEO got carried away with the use of transformative, and that he didn't write the software, and the developers are more the intuitive type and they have a search mind set that has been intuitive from the start?

Let's hope so - and if this guy is to be believed, the people building Powerset do indeed have 2 brains and think in the 5th dimension, so it should all work swimmingly.

This is a product to watch, and I for one look forward to trying it out and I will of course start with a search for The Pisstakers web search, Funny Quotes of the day, and roger my uncle. Powersetting should be an interesting exercise, but whether it is more natural and intuitive than Googling, only time will tell.

Powerset is a natural search engine?

There was a bigger alarm bell this morning , however, about whether this Powerset deal is more spin than revolution when a sharp-eyed geek commenting on Tech Crunch wondered why could he see a category on the screenshot called Porn?

As has been mentioned, however, the PORNOGRAPHY crisis is over. That screenshot isn't the search engine and the Porn category, pah, it's a joke that all you sex industry tourists hoping for good deals for Thailand can just wipe from your sleazy minds. So I too can strike the words that tumbled out my irrelevant mind.

As I understand it, Porn is short for pornography . Soft porn is an unnatural representation of a natural act. Hard core porn can be a graphic representation of some pretty unnatural acts. This reference to porn in the promo screenshot therefore seems to go directly against what the Powerset guys are trying to achieve right out the box - natural search for the masses.Or does the term transformative explain away these criticisms , and Powersets is natural, intuitive and for the masses who struggle to read a black background?

Never has so much confusion reigned over natural language! But thanks to Powerset Product manager Mark Johnson for calling my attention to this confused state of mind. And I guess that judging by the way he mainly referred to "PORN" on the blog as the P word, the PTakers won't get a mention in our entirety!