Powerset, a search engine, which was once touted as a "Google Killer", and was sold to Microsoft for $100 million a couple months ago, is now being integrated into Microsoft's Live Search results (at least to a limited extent).
The latest Nielsen stats put Microsoft's share of the search market at an unimpressive 11.9 percent. What's more (or to be accurate, less), its year-over-year growth is negative. But Microsoft's search team has an interesting ally in its corner, as it turns out Bill Gates may still be lending some sort of hand.
Of all the post-Google search engine startups, Powerset was touted as the most likely Google-killer. We waited with bated breath, we rubbered our necks around to get a better glimpse—early reports were stellar, yes this was the one to take on Google and. . .Wait, what? Sold to Microsoft. $100 million? Wait, what?
Satya Nadella, the senior vice president of Microsoft's Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, isn't afraid to admit that the current crop of search engines suffer from some problems. Nadella seems to be hoping, however, that his company's acquisition of Powerset will help it solve them.
A reported price tag of $100 million will deliver the much-hyped Powerset and its natural language search technology to Microsoft.
After a lot of blog buzz, Powerset finally launched its search engine with the initial aim at pulling information out of Wikipedia more effectively.
UPDATE 4/9/08: Seems there was some confusion sparked by this piece, which is, at best, a muddled, meandering, word-labyrinth posing as an unconventional, smart-alecky essay on web journalism/blogging. That's okay, any reader would find himself in good company lost amid my verbose effluvia. For crying out loud, I used a word like "bildungsroman" and made references not just to Roman mythology but also to an obscure Persian king 3,500 years dead.
In “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the Black Knight always gets a laugh by claiming that the loss of both his arms is “just a flesh wound.” Now Powerset’s COO has left the company, its CEO is changing roles, and it, too, claims to be okay.
Researchers at IBM Almaden have been developing a semantic search process that can delve into unstructured text to retrieve structured information.
Powerset, a company that focuses on “natural language search,” recently discussed its to-be-released-in-September search engine, and there’s some very interesting stuff going on. Very interesting, and very hard to understand.
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