There has been a lot of speculation surrounding the value of Powerset’s technology, and the Microsoft acquisition of the company.
Last week’s Techcrunch interview with Barney Pell and Ramez Naam contains a lot of insight about the technology and the acquisition.
It is true that building a search index by parsing and understanding web pages is more expensive than building a keyword index. Scaling up from wikipedia to the whole web is something which will require a lot of resources, which the Microsoft acquisition provides.
I was compelled to reply to a recent blog post on ZDnet speculating that Microsoft acquired Powerset solely to enhance its advertising offerings, not search. This is pure speculation. As far as I know, and as far as the Techcrunch article indicates, Powerset under Microsoft will still be doing search.
It was announced yesterday that Microsoft is acquiring Powerset.
This is a great deal for Microsoft – Powerset’s natural language technology really can give Microsoft’s search a significant bump in the quality of its search results. Parsing the web is computationally expensive, but Microsoft have the resources there to do it. These computational resources, and the all the other significant resources we now have access to at Microsoft, will allow Powerset to advance its goals, so this is a great deal for Powerset too.
Big changes like this introduce
I have noticed a lot of wikipedia reading and searching applications cropping up on the web recently.
ReadWriteWeb recently published a list of top 10 ways to search Wikipedia, but some things are missing, so here is my list:
We seem to have gone live a few minutes early! Awesome!!
It’s been a while since I blogged… moving jobs is a very absorbing activity.
So, now I’m working at Powerset, a San Francisco startup which is building a cool natural language search engine, which allows for a much more powerful and precise kind of search than that offered by traditional search engines.
You can participate in this revolution in search at Powerlabs. Sign up now and get in on the action early…
For more details see this post on the Powerset blog.
