TAG | On the rebound from Yahoo, Microsoft buys into semantic search instead |
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| by Davey Winder | |
| Friday, 04 July 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 Satya Nadella, a Senior Vice President of the 'Search, Portal, and Advertising' group at Microsoft has confirmed that the many rumours are in fact, well, fact. Microsoft is buying Powerset, a San Francisco-based company that specialises in natural language processing within the search sphere. That's semantic search to the rest of us. That shared vision, according to Microsoft, is to take search to the next level by "adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages." This semantic web vision is, of course, nothing new. Tim Berners-Lee, that British bloke who invented the world wide web itself, said way back in 1999 that he had a dream for the Web in which computers "become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize." So how does Microsoft fit into the semantic web road map following this acquisition? Read on to find out... CONTINUED |
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