On the rebound from Yahoo, Microsoft buys into semantic search instead

By Davey Winder
Friday, 04 July 2008 03:33

Home IT

Many have been asking where does Microsoft's search strategy go if not in the direction of a Yahoo! deal? The answer could well be straight towards the semantic web following the acquisition of Powerset, a 'natural language search provider' for an as yet undisclosed amount. Whether it will be enough to make the slightest bit of difference when it comes to playing catch-up with Google and, yes, Yahoo! remains to be seen...

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.

Powerset will become part of the core Microsoft Search Relevance team, bringing its engineers and computational linguists to Live Search. "We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there" admits Nadella, adding "We came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision."

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...

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