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

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