Regular search engines such as Google and Yahoo use statistics to make sense of the Web. They count links, keywords, and other items on a page to determine its rank in search results. Semantic search engines try to actually understand the meaning of the words found on the Web and other documents to bring back the most relevant results to a query. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to… → Read More
Microsoft promises that this is just the beginning of the integration with the recently acquired Powerset, but incorporating better Wikipedia clips into Live Search is a far cry from the original promise of the next generation search startup: true natural language search.
Instead we have more Live Search results with dedicated answers (not sure why Powerset was needed for this), and better… → Read More
There is one glaring detail that everyone who reported on the Microsoft-Powerset acquisition has failed to mention: Powerset is a Unix based company. All of its core components – its applications, its packaging system, and its continuous integration system – were designed and written to run on a Unix platform. As a large software company, Microsoft is a big supporter of its own… → Read More
I spoke with Powerset cofounder/CEO Barney Pell and Microsoft’s Live Search General Program Manager Ramez Naam shortly after Microsoft’s announcement of their acquisition of Powerset earlier today. Microsoft intends to use Powerset’s natural language search technology as a major differentiating factor v. no. 1 search player Google (see our recent coverage of Live Search Cashback… → Read More
Techcrunch confirms that Microsoft has announced that they have acquired natural language search engine Powerset for a sum rumored to be around $100M. The acquisition is another key step in Microsofts efforts to gain market share in the online search market – currently dominated by Google and Yahoo. The search team at Microsoft said today in a blog post that they were interested in Powerset… → Read More
Microsoft will announce today that they have acquired San Francisco based semantic search engine Powerset. The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but our understanding from sources close to the deal is that the previously rumored $100 million is “roughly accurate.” In May we reported that Powerset was in acquisition discussions with Microsoft and was hoping to bring another… → Read More
VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company. Our sources have been saying this deal is highly likely since May, but hasn’t actually been signed yet and could still be disrupted by the ongoing Microsoft-Yahoo negotiations. Dave Wehner, a… → Read More
Powerset, the natural language search engine that partially launched in May, has released a mobile version of their site that allows users to quickly search Wikipedia from their iPhone. Since the release of the iPhone a number of sites including iPodia and Wapedia have released optimized versions of Wikipedia (though none actually made by the online encyclopedia). These sites reformat Wikipedia… → Read More
2008 is the year of the search engine startup. Hot on the heels of Powerset’s partial launch earlier this week, stealth search engine Blekko (no logo, no website, just this and, apparently, some technology) raised a second round of financing. The company raised $3 million in equity at a $23 million post-money valuation. All previous investors participated, and new investors Marc Andreessen… → Read More
Today marks another milestone for San Francisco based contextual search engine Powerset. They’ve launched a showcase for their user search experience – effectively the search engine minus the web crawl. For now, Powerset queries only Wikipedia and augments results with data from Freebase. The product launch comes just a day after reports that the company is being shopped to potential… → Read More
San Francisco based search startup Powerset will be launching shortly. For now, Powerset will query only Wikipedia and Freebase. But as I said when the product was demo’d to me a few weeks ago, it is compelling nonetheless: “When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an… → Read More
San Francisco based Powerset will be publicly launching a long-awaited beta version of the service in the coming weeks, the company told me yesterday. They are working on a new kind of search engine that will understand natural language searches and compete with keyword matching engines that dominate search today. An early version of the search engine, which was demo’d to me yesterday at… → Read More
Ok, so that isn’t an actual picture of the new Microsoft Blews news aggregator that was announced by Microsoft Research today, but tell me that the screen shot (see below) doesn’t bring back memories of eating Rocket Pops on the beach as a child (or wherever you ate them). But back to Blews. It’s a news aggregator (see Techmeme and about 45 others, including this gem), but it… → Read More
Keyword search gets you pretty far when looking for pure information, but doesn’t help much on more qualitative searches like trying to find the hippest restaurant in SOHO. Searches like the latter rely on the opinions of people, not webmasters, which is one of the reasons Circo’s has launched their new qualitative search engine. The engine currently lets users search for hotels and… → Read More
Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus (Elk Cloner), co-founded the Open Directory Project, and co-founded online news site Topix, may have bitten off the biggest challenge of his career – taking on Google. In search. Skrenta left Topix last June. He started his new company, Blekko, almost immediately, along with five others from the Topix core team. They raised $2 million in… → Read More
Don’t expect to see natural-language search at Google anytime soon. Despite the buzz of startups like Powerset and, to a lesser degree, true knowledge, Google’s head of research Peter Norvig pooh-poohs the notion that people are clamoring to write full sentences in search boxes. In a Q&A with Technology Review, he says: We don’t think it’s a big advance to be able to… → Read More
Natural-language search startup Powerset is going through some growing pains. Barney Pell is stepping down from the CEO spot. He will now become the CTO, and he and Powerset’s board will conduct a search for a new CEO. Powerset’s other founder and COO, Steve Newcomb, is not in the running for the top job. He has left the company. At the Web 2.0 conference, Pell gave an impressive… → Read More
A reader noticed that stealth search engine Powerset is using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to gauge user reactions to search results. See the screen shot (click for larger view) – users are shown a query and a number of results and are asked to evaluate the relevancy of each result from five choices. In this case, the query is “revealing bikinis.” Users are asked to… → Read More
Session one as follows, including our live notes. Powerset Powerset is a natural language search engine that can use everyday phrases and grammer to conduct more accruate web searches by understanding the search query and the pages it indexes. Parsing phrases and grammer theoretically produces better results because the egine has a better understanding of the searches intended goal than with just… → Read More
In a less than shining moment, Caitlin Upton, the 18 year old Miss South Carolina Teen, answered a fairly simple pagent question with a nonsensical answer: Q: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Who do you think this is? A: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation… → Read More
New natural language search engine Powerset, still in pre-launch stealth mode, has had a ridiculous amount of press this year. And while some have said there is too much hype around this company (even me), you have to give them some credit. They are certainly open with their plans, and willing to experiment with new ideas. An example: they announced Powerlabs, a sandbox for users to suggest and… → Read More
Xerox announced its entry into the search market this week with FactSpotter, document search software that is claimed to go beyond conventional keyword search. FactSpotter is text mining software that combines a linguistic engine that allows users to make queries in everyday language. FactSpotter looks for the keywords contained in a query along with the context those words have. According to… → Read More
When Powerset announced plans to launch a new service called Powerlabs a week ago, it looked to be another sand box area for product previews, like those created by Microsoft, Google and others.But today Steve Newcomb, COO of Powerset, revealed a lot more about the project. I also saw an in person demo of Powerlabs today and some of the ideas behind it. Powerlabs is more than a sandbox to show off… → Read More
In a post last month I wrote about Powerset COO Steve Newcomb’s use of predictive modeling to guess early growth rates so that they have enough hardware to scale. Good for them, I said, for releasing some of the data publicly. And I recommended they go one step further and release the predictive models themselves: Powerset should publish the model itself (without the specific Powerset… → Read More
Powerset is being extremely careful about showing the public how their search engine works until they are ready. After some initial hype (see our posts here, here and here), the company pretty much shut its doors to the press. I did finally get in to see a demo, and was impressed. But the meeting was off-record and we are waiting for a green light to start writing more about the demo and other… → Read More
Any serious Internet startup tries to guess early growth rates so that they have enough hardware to scale (hopefully the software hangs in there, too). Stealth search engine Powerset (see our earlier coverage) is being very transparent about their modelling, and have posted some of their thinking on their company blog. Steve Newcomb, co-founder and COO, wrote the post and goes into considerable… → Read More
The more I dig into the new search engine startup Powerset the more I am wondering if it is nothing more than a house of cards. They’re an odd company with a bit of a split personality. For example, in some ways they are very secretive – everyone who gets to see “The Demo” (as it’s now being called) have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. It’s rare for startups… → Read More
Silicon Valley based search engine startup Powerset has mostly been closed lipped about their product. This makes sense given that they are gunning for the fastest growing Internet company in history, Google. But their excitement over an exclusive deal to license PARC search technology was too much to hold in – the company made what looks to be an exclusive announcement through VentureBeat… → Read More
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