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Like many features at Powerset, our highlighting feature came about through the ingenuity of one of our engineers. Ian was having a discussion about circular polarized filters for camera lenses with his brother. He copied and pasted some text from Wikipedia into an IM chat, but his brother was dubious: “Where did that come from?” After Ian tried, unsuccessfully, to navigate his brother to the right passage in the Wikipedia article, he thought, “There must be a better way!”

Hence, a new feature was born. User Highlighting allows you to highlight sentences on a Powerset page. The highlighted passage persists when you bookmark or share the URL.

To use, just click the highlighter icon in the Article Outline and then click any sentences that you want to highlight. You can copy and share the URL; your modified page will automatically scroll to the highlighted section. This is made possible by the fact that Powerset semantically marks up Wikipedia and knows where sentences begin and end. It’s a great tool for sharing notes with a friend, posting a specific sentence in context to your blog, or proving someone wrong in an argument.

For example, let’s say that you wanted to share with a friend that John McCain has been a guest on The Daily Show more then anyone else, as of 2006. As opposed to just sending over that

Powerset at Internet Librarian 2008October 20

From October 20-22 Powerset will be attending the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, CA. This year’s theme is “Beyond 2.0: User-Focused Tools & Practices,” and Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land will be making a Keynote Presentation “Search Engine Land: What’s Happening Out There?”

We’re excited to be able to speak to so many internet-savvy librarians, to show off how Powerset is a cutting-edge research tool and to gather feedback about how to make Powerset even better.

Powerset is sponsoring the Internet Café. If you’re attending, stop by to check your e-mail, learn about Powerset, and get some nifty schwag!

Powerset at Web 3.0 next weekOctober 8

Powerset is excited to be participating in Web 3.0, held in Santa Clara from October 16-17, 2008.

Scott Prevost, Powerset’s general manager, will be keynoting in the morning on Friday, where he’ll describe The Road to Semantic Search. Also, Mark Johnson, a Powerset Program Manager, will be hosting a roundtable discussion on Thursday afternoon called Semantic Startup 101 – Successes, challenges, and strategic decisions, featuring Alitora, Cerebra, Metaweb, and Evri.

If you’re interested in attending, you can get a full conference pass or just come to the Expo Hall and keynotes for only $50. We hope to see you there!

Powerset's First Live Search ProjectsSeptember 17

Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago and we’ve already completed our first few integration projects: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using our Factz engine .

These projects were meant to be achievable in 30 days and act as a first collaboration between the Live Search and Powerset teams. We have plans for deeper integration in the future, but these projects gave us an opportunity to get to know our colleagues up in Redmond and drive greater understanding of our respective technologies. All of these projects are currently being “flighted” on Live Search, which means that they are being shown only to a small percentage of users (if you get one, consider yourself lucky!). Once we’ve gotten data back from the tests, we’ll plan next steps and decide what features will eventually roll into the product.

The first project was to expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows Answers. Queries like San Francisco weather, MSFT, and Banff national park already produce answers. Also, many celebrities from

Powerset/Microsoft Lunch 2.0 RecapSeptember 5

Powerset+Microsoft hosted another Lunch 2.0 this year. We seved delicious food, including sliders and cupcakes. There were lots of people from many different companies present and we all celebrated the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset with our commerative shot glasses. Andrew Mager of ZD Net did a great writeup of the event (and he tooks some rockin’ pictures). Terry Chay was there with his huge camera and took a gorgeous set of pics with his fancy camera. In the photo is Marie Williams of SHIFT, Linda Chan of Powerset, and me.

Expect Powerset+Microsoft Live Search to be hosting more events like this in the future, so subscribe to our blog or check our