How to Research a Topic with the Speed of Light

Well, not actually, because Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity says that it is possible to go at a speed lower or higher than that of light but NOT at the speed of light.

PowerSet, a natural-language search engine started in 2005 takes search to a new level. You can find answers by typing in your questions directly, not just by keying in the keywords.

Powerset mainly focuses on Wikipedia - it finds topics from Wikipedia and lists it in a more user-friendly manner.

If you still can't get it than just head over to PowerSet and try some queries for yourself! And if you're not sure about what you should search than you can try some queries like

• what is chemotherapy
• Leonardo da Vinci
• what was invented at Bell Labs

Some of the features that I like about PowerSet are that it is natural language based and that means less searching and fast results. And because it aggregates the info from trusted sources like Wikipedia and FreeBase it is much more accurate and includes next to no spam.

Factz is a new feature that extracts information about a particular topic from the sentences in Wikipedia. It is based on a simple grammar trick >> subject and its relation with the object.

What does Powerset say about Factz

What are Factz?

Factz are concise representations of information extracted from sentences. They are represented in three parts: the subject, relation and object (e.g. Oswald shot JFK). Factz are one way that Powerset represents the meaning of a sentence. Of course, Factz do not always represent truth, but rather propositions that are asserted in the text of Wikipedia.

On the search results page, you will often see Factz for general topic queries. These Factz are collected from pages across Wikipedia. Click a word in one of the three columns to see the sentences that support the selected fact.

On a particular topic page, you can see the Factz extracted from the given page in the outline. Click on one to scroll directly to the sentence from which the fact was derived.

Let me show you an example of a query and its Factz.

Query for France, one of my favorite European Countries shows the following result(Please Click to Enlarge the Picture)

The Factz about France say the following:

sent: troops, supplies, aircraft, soldiers and helicopters
declared: war
oppressed: Germany, movements and movements

If you notice carefully, the oppressed section has two identical words, movements. This is because PowerSet may have encountered France in relation to Oppression in 2 distinct Wikipedia articles! And there are about 111 Factz on France besides all the great results it gives.

So if you're having a class assignment due by tomorrow and you don't have time to thoroughly read and understand the topic you can make use of the Powerset Factz that are fun to discover about a particular subject.