Microsoft Corp. made an announcement to buy San Francisco search company Powerset on Tuesday. Redmond-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) didn’t give a price, but media reports it is around $100 million. Powerset focuses on “natural-language search,” a form of artificial intelligence that seeks to understand the meaning of both user queries and Web pages.

Semantic or natural-language search relies on sentence structure, syntax, dictionaries, and thesauri to extract meaning from text, rather than relying on how heavily Web pages are linked to one another to determine the relevance of search results.

Barney Pell, one of Powerset’s co-founders, said joining Microsoft would give Powerset the scale it needs to extend its technology to the entire Web. Powerset’s approach to search requires enormous computing power.

“We know today that roughly a third of searches don’t get answered on the first search and first click.  The reason is that today’s search engines don’t understand when similar concepts, like “shrub” and “tree,” are expressed in different words or phrases. In addition, some results can appear to be more relevant to computers than they actually are to humans. Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities,”  Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president for search, product and advertising, wrote in a blog post today.

Still, it’s mostly an huge battle for Microsoft. The latest worldwide market share numbers from Web statistics firm Net Applications have Google with 78.35 percent of searchers in June, followed by Yahoo at 11.78 percent. In comparison, the combined share of Microsoft’s MSN Search and Live Search in the same time period totaled a mere 5.22 percent.

Source: Bizjournals

Google has expanded its Google Trends tool with new numerical data. Google Trends was originally released as a tool that let you see visual comparisons between search volume of keywords. It’s a new tool that lets users take a peek at the traffic data from sites around the web. The new feature pits Google against a number of well-established players in the traffic data space, including Compete, Comscore, Alexa, and a host of others.

Instead of turning to their goldmine of Analytics data, Trends combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

The company claims to have high hopes for Trends: “Google Trends is not only a fun tool; it also offers some practical uses as well. Suppose you own an ice cream shop and don’t know which flavours to serve, or suppose you’re responsible for stocking supermarkets across the country; Trends can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of your products.”

The useful applications for a tool like this is pretty extensive. Trends for Web Sites is a global product, available in the US and worldwide but the only supported language is English. In any event, I am personally very excited to use, Search Engines, this new product.

Source: PC pro

Yahoo said Thursday that under the new Google pact, it will display some ads sold by its rival in a deal Yahoo estimated would generate $800 million in annual revenue.

A Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, said in an interview that the company was happy to have Yahoo as an advertising partner but refused to discuss Google’s expected financial gain from the deal.

Yahoo will control how Google’s ads are displayed alongside its own advertising. The pact is sure to face regulatory scrutiny. The companies agreed to delay its implementation for up to three-and-a-half months to allow a Justice Department review.

“This is not a merger. Rather, we are merely providing access to our advertising technology to Yahoo! through our AdSense program.– This does not remove a competitor from the playing field. Yahoo! will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating,” said Omid Kordestani, Google’s SVP of Global Sales and Business Development in a blog post.

Under the agreement, Yahoo can run ads supplied by Google alongside its own search results and on some of its websites in the United States and Canada. Each placement will be a mini-auction run by Yahoo in which Yahoo and Google bid to sell the ad.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay said that could add as much as $5 per share to Yahoo’s value, which he currently pegs at $25 per share.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Google explained its vision for Web Development in the next three years at its developers conference being held in San Francisco. Google Inc. will invest in three key areas for developers, including opening up its servers to host their applications, encouraging pervasive connectivity to the Web, and making the browser more powerful, said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering,

“After years of competition among platforms, the Web has won because it’s open, because it’s ubiquitous, and because there’s a passionate community working together to move it forward,” said Gundotra in a statement. “Openness is great for developers and for users because it knocks down hurdles to building great applications, and because it speeds the next wave of innovation by letting good ideas be shared. The Web doesn’t depend on any one API or tool or product, from Google or anyone else. What makes the real difference is the aggregate effect of us all working together, with open standards and open source.”

Here is a brief summary of the plan:

Making the Cloud More Accessible

Google will open up the Google data centers so that developers can more easily scale their applications. It allows developers to run applications on Google’s huge server infrastructure. This will be done using the Google App Engine.

Android for Windows Mobile Platform

Steve Horowtiz, engineering director for Google’s Android mobile phone platform, demonstrated that you don’t need an iPhone to have an appealing mobile interface and compelling mobile applications. When he showed how an Android phone, using an internal compass, could dynamically adjust Google Street View images to match the facing of the phone user, there was applause.

Make the Browser More Powerful

As Per Google, Gears plug-in (which allows people to take Web apps offline and utilize the power of their desktop) and HTML 5 represent the future of the Web browser. By using these tools to extend the capabilities of JavaScript, Gundotra said, Web apps can become more powerful and more rich.

Source: ComputerWorld

Based on the popular Web 2.0 infrastructure, Paglo’s software-as-a-service (Saas) was first introduced to the public in November, but today marks the first day it is available for public use. The service will be available for free until the fall, when Paglo says it will implement a paid model.

Paglo’s relevance within an organization can be as simple as telling users whether their business IT system complies with Microsoft licensing policies to whether their individual machines have the latest security patches for installed software such as Microsoft Office. Paglo creates indexes of businesses’ information and keeps these data hidden from within the members of the organization.

Paglo users download a crawler application that traverses their IT environments and collects performance-related data and other information. The results then get pushed up to Paglo’s server, where they are stored in a separate index for each customer. Users can set how often they want the crawler to canvass the network or a particular asset in order to get the most up-to-date information into the index.

Users conduct searches through a Web-based interface. Results can come back in traditional, Google-like form, or as tables and chart visualizations, such as for the traffic patterns on a particular server over a length of time.

In addition, Paglo has created an API (application programming interface) that enables users to create connections to additional network assets.

“Imagine you have an old mainframe that has an old ERP (enterprise resource planning) system on it. We want to make it really easy for an IT administrator to have that information available in their [search] index,” said Paglo Chief Technology Officer Chris Waters.

The customizable Paglo Dashboard allows users to implement widgets and other technologies to make the Dashboard as user friendly as possible.

Source: BetaNews

In order to compete with Google, Microsoft decided to return consumers a portion of their purchases if they buy goods through its Live Search cashback program.

“I think years from now, you may look back and say, ‘Wow, search started to get a fair bit more competitive, and we can look back to that announcement.’ We think what we’ve got is super-neat here, but we can see taking this in some new directions.” Microsoft’s Bill Gates told the crowd.

For consumers, the program is getting attention for its promise to refund a portion of the purchase price on items they buy via Live Search. But for advertisers, the most intriguing bit is Live Search cashback’s use of a cost-per-acquisition model, which allows them to pay for the ad only when a consumer makes a purchase as a result of an ad, as opposed to the standard model that requires them to pay when someone clicks on an ad.

After consumers click through to a merchant’s site and buy an eligible product, the designated discount will be paid into an online account where the refunds will accumulate and be available via direct deposit to a bank or PayPal account, or by check.

Cashback programs have been tried by smaller search engines, with mixed results. Because of Microsoft’s big online presence, its new initiative could get lots of attention in the industry and among consumers.

Source: Seattlepi.com

The new search engine company, Powerset, has released a public beta version of its search engine. Right now, Powerset can only search Wikipedia. In the new version, people can search using simple phrases, short questions and keywords. The product launch comes just a day after reports that the company is being shopped to potential buyers by investment bank Allen & Co.

The way that Powerset returns queries means that answers are often found in the result snips. They are also structuring a lot of the Wikipedia and (and already structured Freebase) data and inserting it into results. So a search for “Bill Clinton” shows results, but also shows Freebase structured data along with additional query refinements to get to more information. The important thing below isn’t the structured data in the results, its the fact that you can click on the action words and drill down into very specific queries (to find, for example, what bills he signed, or which Supreme Court justices he nominated).

Powerset is indexing web pages much differently than normal search engines, which generally just record content to match against keyword queries. Instead, Powerset is trying to understand the content on the page so that it can be matched meaningfully to queries later. Even queries that don’t use matching words.

Powerset definitely has an interesting search product on its hands. Its approach of pulling third-party content into its own UI and providing tools to better analyze it is undeniably useful. On the other hand, Google and Yahoo will be watching to see if Powerset’s semantic search proves popular.

Source: Washington Post