As Bill Gates enjoyed his last day as a Microsoft employee Friday, rumors swirled that CEO Steve Ballmer was ready to make a powerful move to improve search capability. An unconfirmed report in VentureBeat said Microsoft will acquire semantic-search start-up PowerSet for $100 million.
At the same time, Gates told NBC's Tom Brokaw that it's unlikely Microsoft would cut a deal with Yahoo. Microsoft sought to acquire Yahoo, the No. 2 search and advertising company behind Google, for $47.5 billion. Ballmer walked away from the deal after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang refused a sweetened offer and cut a deal with Google to share search revenues.
Powerset, founded in 2005 by artificial-intelligence technologist Barney Pell, focuses on natural-language searches. On its Web site, the company says its strategy is to "improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language."
A Different Approach
The first implementation of Powerset's technology is a Wikipedia search engine, which it says "gives more accurate results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles."
The approach is fundamentally different than Google's, which delivers what most users consider excellent results by analyzing the frequency of words typed into the query box and ranks results in part on the number of inbound links to a given page. Microsoft's rumored acquisition of Powerset is intriguing, then, because it would not only raise in-house search technology but do so in a fundamentally different way than Google.
If Powerset's technology can be made to work across the Web, as opposed to the rather limited and well-structured Wikipedia, it has the potential to make a Microsoft search more useful than a Google search.
Uncertain Technology
But the technology has risks, Venture Beat's Matt Marshall noted. Getting computers to understand language in any meaningful way has long been an elusive goal of...

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