Powerset, we hardly knew ya. The much-hyped natural language search engine has been acquired by Microsoft for north of $100 million according to VentureBeat. The search engine, which presently only lets you search Wikipedia articles, works by allowing users to enter in queries the way they would speak them, for example, searching for “what is the numeric value of pi?” as opposed to typing “pi numeric value” on Google or Yahoo. Hence, the name “natural search.”
It makes a lot of sense for first-time Internet users, but for those of us who have been using traditional search engines for 10+ years and “learned their language” so-to-speak, is it really that big of a game changer? Microsoft apparently believes so and is adding it to their search arsenal, which now also includes paying users to use it through Live Search Cashback.
With Microsoft’s resources and collection of data centers around the globe, they have an opportunity to make Powerset scale to the whole Web – a criticism of the service and natural search in general – and presumably the reason it is currently limited to Wikipedia search. Will it ultimately replace the algorithms that Live Search currently uses? Too early to tell, but $100 million is a relatively small bet in Microsoft’s world – though a heck of a payoff for a startup that never officially launched its main product.
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Report: Microsoft to Acquire Powerset Natural Language Search for $100M+
