OStatic

Last week, following a report in VentureBeat, we wrote about the rumor that Microsoft was set to acquire natural language search company Powerset for $100 million. Turns out the rumor was true, although the terms of the deal are not disclosed. Powerset gets its semantic search muscle from the open source, cluster-based technology Hadoop. As we've discussed before, Hadoop also powers much of Yahoo's search. It looks like Microsoft's LiveSearch is going to be embracing powerful open source clustered search. This could represent a new chapter in natural language search. Find more analysis on GigaOm.