It's hard for me to believe it, but a year ago today, we launched Powerset.com. Of all the products I've launching in my career, I'm most proud to be a part of the Powerset team. Happy Birthday, Powerset.com!
So, how did it go?
The launch itself was a resounding success. Powerlabs and the amazing community (thanks, Powerlabbers!) helped to hone the final product into something highly usable, despite the underlying complex technology.
Though we mistakenly flipped the switch and went live a few hours earlier than we had planned, the huge engineering effort to ensure launch capacity was worth it: Powerset went down only once for <30 minutes when we got slashdotted.
Press coverage was awesome. The 30+ press briefings we did prior to the launch helped to calm some of the hype around Powerset ("No, we're not a Google-killer, yes, we have some cool technology, yes, this is a long journey," etc.). Some of the hype is unavoidable, but I think people realized that we had the seeds of something really cool.
When we started getting real-world queries, we found that users are ready, willing, and able to type in natural language queries. However, we also discovered that it's really hard to market a Wikipedia search engine to people (lots of people wanted to search for Pizza near their house). As we predicted, once people had a taste of natural language search, they wanted much, much more.
Then, on July 1, 2008, it was announced that Microsoft had decided to purchase Powerset.
This was an amazing start, but the journey has just begun. I wrote a post a year ago musing about whether Powerset crossed The Uncanny Valley. I think it's safe to say that neither Powerset nor anyone after us has been able to create a semantic search experience that meets users' expectations. However, now that we're part of Microsoft, I'm really excited that Powerset will help to transform the Live Search experience. We've got a lot of things in the pipeline, so keep checking back for more announcements.






