acquire(_microsoft, _powerset)

Congratulations to everyone at Powerset! I’m psyched to be working once more with Barney.

While many may remark on aspects of this deal, I for one am still quite amazed that industry watchers are still completely misunderstanding what Powerset, and companies in this space, actually do. Take this post by Todd Bishop:

Powerset's technology attempts to figure out the meaning and intent behind phrases typed into search engines, seeking to improve search results.

Powerset’s technology will still deliver results even if you put in a simple noun phrase. A huge part of the equation is what they do in the back end. Kevin Heisler at Search Engine Watch continues with the lack of depth:

[natural language search] means you can type questions in a search box the way you normally ask them. (Think Ask Jeeves 1.5)

Comments

[Dmitry]

So far the demos are rather unimpressive. NL search (or, rather, large scale question answering) IS the future, it's just that Powerset is probably not any closer to it than anyone else. And we can highlight the synonyms (with disambiguation) and noun phrases in search snippets perfectly fine even without the "super proprietary" PARC technology.

Although I'd very much like to be proven wrong on this one.