02 July 2008

Microsoft acquires Powerset

Bigmouthmedia reported two days ago that there were strong rumours that Microsoft was in talks about the purchase of Search Engine start-up Powerset. This takeover moved far more rapidly than their stalled attempts to aquire Yahoo! and Microsoft have now completed the deal.

We wrote about Powerset back in May, identifying it as one of several new search engines which could eventually become big players. It's interesting to see that Microsoft thought the same.

What could be even more interesting is watching what the Redmond Giant does with Powerset. The fledgling search engine has only delivered results on Wikipedia pages so far and its spiders have not been let loose to crawl the World Wide Web. Presumably it will require huge amounts of development and infrastructure investment to do this, given the laborious way that Powerset processes information.

The results produced by Powerset could be just the sort of shot in the arm the MSN/Microsoft Live search engine needs to make it different enough to actually compete with Google.

Powerset allows users to search using natural sentences rather than strings of words. This is not a new idea; Ask Jeeves marketed itself as having this ability years ago but in reality produced results in more or less the same way as most other search engines. Powerset, it is hoped, will eventually be able to understand words depending on their context. The example given by the Live Search team was the word "cancer" which can mean a disease or star sign depending on the surrounding words.

Powerset spends more time collecting and processing the data it crawls which will hopefully allow it, eventually, to produce far richer results. The downside will be the comparatively large cost of producing the final search results.

The Ask Jeeves example is a good warning to Microsoft before it pumps huge amounts of cash in to this project as it has never been clear whether Ask Jeeves failed with its question style of searching because the results were poor, because people don't like searching by using questions, or because people simply preferred Google.

Google is still riding high and people seem pretty happy searching the way they are: the Powerset results will have to be pretty good to change people's minds.

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