OStatic

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.