Is Microsoft Going to Acquire Powerset?

by Sam Dean - Jun. 27, 2008Comments (2)

While it's still only a rumor, VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset for over $100 million--apparently to be announced next month. Powerset's search technology uses the open source cluster-based technology Hadoop, which provides fast answers to queries by using the resources of many computers. We wrote about both Hadoop and Powerset here, and got to hear from Powerset's Chad Walters. Based on what I saw Chad demonstrate, and Microsoft's need to catch up in search, I won't be surprised if this rumor is true.

According to VentureBeat: "By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine. The move comes as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to argue that improving search is Microsoft’s most important task." You bet that Microsoft is focused on this, which was also a big part of why Microsoft was interested in acquiring Yahoo. (Yahoo also makes extensive use of Hadoop for its search.)

Also according to VentureBeat, Powerset was given a valuation of $42.5 million when it got its first round of financing two years ago.  There is much more detail in the link to VentureBeat's post atop this story.

It's worth noting that Google has been somewhat dismissive of Powerset's search technology.  That doesn't surprise me, as natural language search got a bad reputation years ago when attempts such as AskJeeves failed to make it popular. However, Powerset's search was quite impressive in the demo I saw, and its Wikipedia-based searching has drawn a lot of attention.

This could be a good move for Microsoft, which trails Google and Yahoo in search by a large margin--one the company is acutely aware of. We'll stay tuned to see if the rumor comes to fruition.


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2 Comments
 

This isn't a 'game changing' application and searching through wikipedia can be easily done through Google (or Wikipedia!) and I wouldn't be surprised if Google can turn on specialized "Natural Language" search in a quarter if they felt it was, indeed, important...

0 Votes

I agree with the above statement by Mike, this is not a game changing application at all. Yes, natural language or semantic (as opposed to current keyword) search is very sophisticated technology and there is a fair amount of development in this area, what is more challenging is how to present the power of the tool to the user in a meaningful and useful way. We all know Google has the brightest working on natural language technology and we know too that, when comparing the powerset interface to Google in terms of simplicity ... it is a no brainer which will find adoption by the typical user.

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