Redmond, Washington-based software company Microsoft has purchased San Francisco-based Powerset, an  Internet search engine startup founded in October 2005 that specializes in so-called semantic search techniques for finding better answers from the Web by understanding the meaning of written information online instead of the simpler keyword matching techniques widely used today by top search engine companies Google, Yahoo and IAC InterActiveCorp's Ask.com. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed, although the founder of the Web site VentureBeat, Matt Marshall, placed the amount at more than $100 million. Powerset Added To A Post-Gates Microsoft Powerset has developed technology that aims to free users from having to type in the exact words they want to find with a search, and instead will match a query written the same way one might speak in a conversation,  with the most relevant information available based on what the company's software considers the core meaning of Web pages. The move by Microsoft comes as it looks to strengthen its search engine prospects in the wake a failed attempt to purchase the Internet's second most-used search engine firm Yahoo and in a new climate created with last week's departure of company co-founder Bill Gates, who retired to focus on philanthropic efforts. Microsoft announced the acquisition of Powerset Tuesday on its Live Search blog, ending months of speculation surrounding its interest in the semantic search firm, and giving it a potential boost of new technology with which it can attempt to better compete against runaway search leader Google, which controls nearly 70 percent of the search engine market. Powerset and its workforce of some 60 employees, including many well-known in the field of natural language processing -- a branch of artificial intelligence -- will remain in its San Francisco headquarters as part of a Microsoft division dedicated to search engines, according to Satya Nadella, Microsoft senior vice president of search, portals and advertising, who announced the acquisition Tuesday. Nadella said Microsoft planned to add more engineers to the San Francisco Powerset group in the coming months. Engineering Roots Run Deep At Powerset "Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists," Nadella said, and praised the Powerset employees, called them a "great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC." The roots of the Powerset's search technology date back more than three decades to methods founded by Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center subsidiary, which the company has combined with its own in-house technology. Xerox PARC was responsible for many early computer innovations including the mouse, graphical user interface, and laser printing technology. Nadella said Microsoft had acquired Powerset because "we're impressed with the people there," and because "Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research." Powerset co-founder and chief technology officer Barney Pell is a former NASA research scientist with a degree from Cambridge, who Microsoft described as a "visionary and incredible evangelist," qualities that the world's largest software maker hope to utilize as it seeks to improve Live Search, the third most-used search engine which holds about a 6 percent share of the search market. Limited Implementation Within Live Search Expected By End Of Year Microsoft expects to begin incorporating some of Powerset's semantic search technology into Live Search by the end of 2008, according to Ramez Naam, Microsoft's general program manager for Live Search, in a recent TechCrunch report. Since 2006 Microsoft has spent some $500 million building its core internal structure, and roughly $8 billion buying Web technology firms, including 9 so far in 2008 such as Norwegian business search specialist firm Fast Search and Transfer ASA, which it bought in January for roughly $1.2 billion. Powerset had taken in funding valued at more than $10 million prior to Tuesday's acquisition by Microsoft. In May Powerset began its first public test, covering searches of the millions of pages of information from user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia and Metaweb Technologies' online database Freebase, that allowed for queries using natural language phrasing such as "What is the capital of Puerto Rico?" The test saw Powerset software analyze every word and sentence of text from Wikipedia and Freebase to gauge their meaning, and used its technology to show what it considered the more relevant answers to searchers' questions. Wikipedia Test Will Attempt To Scale To Entire Web Users of the Powerset test can search Wikipedia and see annotated entries on results pages, and related  ideas the company called "Factz" that show overview summaries of search queries and are able to bring users directly to the most relevant portion of a Web page. "This is just to whet users' appetites for more and more," Pell said in May when the test began. With the backing of Microsoft, Powerset's search technology will likely be tested on a much larger scale, when it is applied to all portions of the Web that Live Search has indexed. "This is absolutely an attempt to scale out Powerset, to understand the meaning and content of every page on the Web," Naam said in a recent Forbes report. "We're one of the only companies with the resources to be able to do this, and we think it's a huge synergy between Powerset's technology and our resources," Naam added. Google released a statement welcoming competition within the search sector it currently dominates. "Search is a highly competitive industry and we welcome competition that stimulates innovation and provides
users with more choice," Google said Tuesday. Microsoft Buys Semantic Search Specialist Powerset At one of the most popular online discussion forums for webmasters, reaction to Microsoft's acquisition of Powerset, and of semantic search in general, was mixed. At WebmasterWorld.com, one of the Internet's oldest hangouts for the technically savvy people that help run the Web, a member using the handle "incrediBILL" saw the Microsoft purchase of Powerset as a mostly positive move that was "cheaper and less disruptive to Microsoft than trying to buy Yahoo," the member wrote. "The problem facing Microsoft at this point is that Google is a trusted brand," the member added. Another WebmasterWorld member, using the handle "Murdoch," questioned whether some of the types of changes Powerset is looking to bring to search engine functionality might be ill advised. "Aren't the search engines semantic enough already?" the user asked. "When I search for something I want to find 'it', not something maybe like it. I don't want my search engine to think for me. I just want it to deliver results for terms I put in it. Is that so much to ask?" Microsoft said that about 5 percent of the searches it processed contained portions of natural language which traditionally have not been interpreted easily by existing technology, according to Naam. Competitors to Powerset in the semantic search sector include Hakia, Cognition Search, and Lexxe, among others. Related Links:
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11:39 pm on July 2, 2008 (utc 0)