I know. In fact, I interviewed there last year, on the day of Scott’s demo at sfBeta. Adonomics was acquired before I finished the process. Say “hi” to Tim, Linda, and Andrew for me.

For the sake of argument let’s ignore the fact that you’ve been hyping yourselves as a revolutionary new search paradigm for the last two years and look at your “enhanced Wikipedia experience” on the face of it.

Factz just isn’t that compelling. I’ll even use one of your hand-picked examples, Henry VII.

Ok, so I’m in a mindset where I want to learn about Henry VIII. The first thing I’d normally do is type “henry viii” into Google. The first result is the Wikipedia page. I look at the Wikipedia page and get all the salient facts I could want.

With Powerset the only real savings I can see is that I’m spared the click over to Wikipedia. Is that revolutionary? In fact, it requires I change my search behavior to get value, which is an almost sure-fire way to damn a product.

There’s some value above Google, but remember: success equals execution minus expectations. Coupled with the fact that plenty of fact-based queries (e.g., “Who was the tenth President of the US?”) return absolute gibberish, there’s just no way I’d use Powerset.

From my perspective it feels like this was a tech demo designed to secure additional financing, not a fully-featured product in its own right. Maybe you should ask Barney what the strategic purpose of this release was.

I think you missed two key parts of Powerset, though. First, when you type in a regular topical query, Powerset extracts Factz from across Wikipedia. This is a unique feature enabled by our semantic processing that ya just can’t get in a regular keyword engine. Also, take a look at our enhanced Wikipedia pages. Note that we also have Factz on the page, which often provide a concise summary of the topic.

I signed up for your KallOut beta. I want an invite =)

What piqued me the most about this launch was how unexciting the demo video was. I’m sure there’s some amazing software at work here…it’s just not blatantly apparent (from the video or casual use).

Thanks for writing,

Ethan