Venturebeat reports that Microsoft might be close to acquiring the San Francisco based semantic search engine Powerset for about $100 Million. No announcement has been made yet by either party. We have contacted Microsoft and Powerset for confirmation and will update this post once we receive more information.
Rumor"s about Microsoft"s interest in Powerset had been swirling around the Valley since last month, when Dan Farber first brought up the possibility in a post on CNet.
The consumer-facing side of Powerset currently only searches Wikipedia articles, but Microsoft is most likely more interested in using the underlying technology for its own search products like Live Search. Powerset"s specialty is providing answers through natural language queries like "When was Henry VIII born?" Powerset licensed this technology from Xerox PARC).
Having backing from Microsoft could help the small company to expand beyond Wikipedia and start indexing more of the Internet.
Mircosoft"s search products have struggled to gain any ground back from Google"s search. Currently, Google has more than a 60% share in the search market, while MSN/Live Search has about 9.5$.
Powersets capabilities have generally received very positive reviews and in his original piece on this, Dan Farber already argued that Powerset"s ability to create connections between concepts, relationships, and meanings could give it a heads-up over Google"s keyword and PageRank driven search.
Powerset was funded in a $12.5 Million Series A round by Foundation Capital, Founders Fund and various angel investors.
>>Source Link
>>Blog: Read/WriteWeb
>>Publish Date: 6/27/2008 7:02:23 AM
>>Keywords: powerset search
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