Semantic Search is picking up...
I have three names so far that are pretty awesome in their own unique way..
Tough Twine was the first one to get there but Powerset by Powerlabs was the one values the most, as it recently got acquired by Microsoft for a whopping USD $100 Million and then there is Cognition.
All these companies have one word in coming, Semantic Search.
We might be talking here about a post Google era, which might be in the shave of either Google acquiring one of these or a similar company or itself developing the next generation search technology.
I don’t know why but I have started to feel that Google is spending way too much attention on its advertising than on improving its core technology. This might particularly harm google in the coming years, Microsoft seems to be gearing up to take on the search giants… after its already (twice) failed attempts on taking over Yahoo, it is focusing on acquiring smaller chunks from the market to build its own live search. Personally my experience with Live search has been crappy by I see a lot of future in it.
The central idea aligns very well with the Microsoft’s “Eco System” of everything integrated.
Smaller companies have already been forcing Google into submission lately; Zoho is one of the cases. Which forced google to forge an alliance with salesforce.
Myself being an avid Ai enthusiast, these are very interesting times for me, I think now when we talk about Ai with peers, it will not be followed by smirks and sighs. Instead we should be able to draw a lot of attention.
With bolder ideas appearing such as computing “in the web” looking like a close reality now, we can safely assume that the computation barriers to decoding language semantics are now breakable. And very soon we can expect a lot of news coming out.
Hoping for the best
-Gunish