Semantic Search Company Acquired

San Francisco-based Powerset has been acquired by Microsoft for its natural language search technology. The deal could help Microsoft’s Live Search match Google’s online search engine, which is already effective at answering many natural language queries, and could ultimately improve search in other Microsoft products, such as SharePoint Server and Windows Search.

With the assistance of technology licensed from Xerox PARC, Powerset has developed a so-called semantic search engine, which can index content in documents not only by compiling lists of individual words but also by analyzing the relationships between those words. For example, the engine can understand grammatical elements, such as subjects and verbs, and how they relate to one another. This helps the search engine understand the context of queries, such as whether a query with the word “cancer” is looking for a Web page about the disease or the astrological sign, and could better answer questions phrased in natural language, such as, “What did Bill Gates say to computer hobbyists?” In spring 2008, Powerset released a public beta that applied its search technology against entries in the online Wikipedia encyclopedia. However, Powerset lacked the resources to index huge numbers of Web pages, making Microsoft an attractive bidder—Microsoft’s Live Search engine has indexed more than 20 billion Web pages.