Last summer, we reported on Microsoft's acquisition (reportedly for $100 million) of Powerset, which specializes in semantic search based on the open source, cluster-based software framework Hadoop. This acquisition of an open source-centric search company was more strategic than many people realize. Hadoop also underlies Yahoo!'s search engine with its ability to search large data sets quickly, and the acquisition of Powerset may have played a key part in how Microsoft decided to give up its effort to acquire Yahoo!
Of course, Microsoft's big search engine news of the week is Bing, which I've found to have both strengths and weaknesses. Surprisingly, as The Register reports, ?Powerset's technology plays only a small part in how Bing works, but what it does in Bing is open source-driven, and interesting.
