Microsoft is now going to buy semantic search engine Powerset for $100 million or more. Powerset is a search engine, which has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching and it returns results based on that understanding.
VentureBeat.com is reporting that “By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine. The move comes as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to argue that improving search is Microsoft’s most important task. Microsoft’s market share in search has steadily declined, dropping further and further behind first-place Google and second place Yahoo.”
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Tags: Business, Search Engine
Powerset is working on a new class of web search that relies on insights from linguistics rather than simple keyword strings.