Microsoft buys ‘natural language’ firm Powerset
p2pnet news | Products:- In our story on Microsft boss Bill Gates’ departure, we quote 24/7 Wall Street as saying one of the aims of his successor, Steve Ballmer, is to “ramp up his internet group and search business“.
With that in the background, Microsoft has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, says VentureBeat.
“The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million,” it says, going on:
“Powerset, of San Francisco, has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching, and it returns results based on that understanding.
“By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine.”
Because it seems Ballmer isn’t only interested in what punters say, but also in how they say it.
Google has, “generally dismissed Powerset’s semantic, or “natural language” approach as being only marginally interesting, even though Google has hired some semantic specialists to work on that approach in limited fashion” and its approach, “does very little to understand the possible meaning created by joining two or more words together,” says the story.
But, “while sexy in theory, the natural language approach is difficult to pull off in practice,” states VentureBeat, adding, “Skeptics wonder if the technology can ever be developed enough to be useful within a major search engine. That skepticism abounded during a long secretive stage in Powerset’s development, but the company did launch its service last month to the public, so it’s there for full view.”
Powerset, “doesn’t, at this point, pretend to be able to search the Net, but it isn’t modest about what it ultimately hopes to achieve,” p2pnet posted recently, going on its goal is to, “change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language,” it states.
“Powerset is first applying its natural language processing to search, aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language,” story that the company saying, pointing out its first effort is a “search and discovery experience” for Wikipedia.
Enter keywords, phrases, or even simple questions, into the search box and Powerset, “gives more accurate results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles,” it said.
“What is online freedom of speech?”- we asked it.
It came up with 34,196 responses last month.
Today it responded with 35,467.
.
.Stumble It!
search business – Goodbye Bill Gates, June 27, 2008
VentureBeat – Microsoft to buy semantic search engine Powerset for $100M plus, June 26, 2008
p2pnet – Natural language search engine, May 12, 2008
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