Microsoft buys natural language search company
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Microsoft this week purchased a company called Powerset for a cool $100 million, hoping to capitalize on its natural language search technology. Powerset is apparently a big deal in the search engine world, which is to say it's really exciting to the three guys that know anything about it. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine World said that Powerset is different from traditional search engines. "[Powerset's] technology reads and comprehends each word on a page," he wrote. "It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about. In lieu of a better phrase, call it an 'understanding engine.'" All I understand is that if you're looking for a place for search-related technology to die, you couldn't pick a better home than Microsoft.