Microsoft buys Powerset, gains advantage in the linguistic search market
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Microsoft seems to have become even more aggressive in their efforts to match up with Google.
After having bought Multimap, a web mapping company not so long ago, and having tried to mark its presence in the online advertising space by buying online advertising exchange AdECN, Microsoft has now announced that it has bought the linguistic web search company Powerset for an undisclosed sum, although some sites are reporting a sum of $100 million.
Powerset is a web search company that is building a natural language search engine using semantic language software that reads and understands every sentence on the Web. Meaning, a user can make a search as “Which state has highest income tax?” as opposed to a search like “highest income tax state”. In a blog post announcing the deal, Mark Johnson, the company’s product manager says:
Powerset has always been a small company with big dreams, with the ultimate goal of changing the way humans interact with computers through language,
The current era of search engine traffic is majorly dominated by Google and Yahoo holding the top two spots respectively. On the advertising front, the recent deal between Google and Yahoo has dampened their spirits. However, there has been a lot of talk lately about semantic language search being the future of search. Microsoft, here, is clearly trying to launch early into the race. Even though Microsoft launched the live.com suite of sites, it did not have much impact on the market. With this acquisition, the company has tried to make sure it gains a fair amount of advantage over its arch rival Google in the web search market race.
With other sites like Mahalo and Blekko in the competitive search market as well, it would be interesting to see what Microsoft plans to do with Powerset. Do you think Microsoft has enough ground covered ahead of Google ?
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