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A comment on Ask HN: What strategy would you take to build a search engine today?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What strategy would you take to build a search en... by matt1 on Friday August 28, 2009 @02:58PM (#792014)
PowerSet comes to mind.

How hard was it to do what they did? (I know nothing about semantic search with the exception of what it is.)

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Re:Ask HN: What strategy would you take to build a search en... by jdrock on Friday August 28, 2009 @03:03PM (#792026)
It's hard. Natural language processing and semantic analysis is a fairly deep field of knowledge.

One evidence of its complexity is PowerSet itself. PowerSet launched with just being able to search Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a highly, highly structured body of text that is much, much easier for NLP and semantic technology to analyze. Taking the same technology to the garbled soup that is the web is a whole different ballgame.

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Re:Ask HN: What strategy would you take to build a search en... by moonchuck on Friday August 28, 2009 @03:54PM (#792147)
If you know nothing about it and are looking to launch a product anytime soon, I would focus on targeting a particular demographic with better design, marketing and demographic-specific content.
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