What is Powerset?
A startup company in Silicon Valley with much hype around them as being the Google Killer in the Search Engine world. Naturally, Natural Language Processing has been a reocurring theme in the research space. (There is a good chronological overview of the search space here).
The idea is that you can type an inquiry in English and be returned with the most relevant results. For example, "When did Microsoft move to Redmond?" (Does this sound familiar with the original vision of Ask Jeeves?)
Being able to process the meaning/intent of your words can be very powerful. However, a lot of queries may just be one or two words and people have become accustomed to this. For example, how does it interpret "Jaguar"? Animal or Car?
Is the hype justified? Well, the company and its investors definitely think so. We will be able to find out later this year.
What is Yahoo Pipes?
Ok, so onto something that is actually released to the general public. (Ok, so it's still "beta"; but Yahoo appears to following in Google's footsteps with the perpetual beta releases - note the new Yahoo Mail). So Google has Customized Search and Windows Live Search has Customized Macros Search.
So what is Yahoo left with? Pipes!
While certainly not revolutionary (as several startups have developed browser-based Designers), their Designer for building pipes is fairly impressive. I'm not fully convinced that this is a product that is intuitive enough for the average user. Then again, this is a BETA =) product.
Where can you add to their payload and check this thing out? http://pipes.yahoo.com/
It is certainly a novel idea. Taking a *nix approach and taking that pipe concept to the graphical level with the Visual Designers. Almost reminds you of Visual Studio! Well, not quite... But perhaps, it can be the Visual Studio of Yahoo Pipes building and data aggregation!
Here's a quick walkthrough of setting up your own pipes:
1. Create a New Pipe.
2. Edit it in their Visual Designer
3. Save it (and publish it - if you wish to share publicly)
4. Access it in "my pipes"
5. Click on "Run this Pipe"
6. View the results
7. (Optional) You can subscribe as an RSS feed and others