Mind Mash

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.