Search Engine Firm, Powerset, Bought by Microsoft Live

San Francisco, California - (Website Hosting Directory) - July 7, 2008 - Natural language company, Powerset, has reached an agreement to join Microsoft Live Search's core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in the San Francisco area.

Powerset brings with it natural language technology that is considered to nicely complement other natural language processing technologies that Microsoft Research has in place.

Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising at Live Search explained, ''We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset - Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan - we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.he next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.''
Ms. Nadella continued, ''We know today that roughly a third of searches don't get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this:

* Differences in phrasing or context between a user's search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages. Search engines don't understand today that 'shrub' and 'tree' are similar concepts. We don't understand that 'cancer' sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which.
* Lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results. Sometimes a result looks relevant from its short description on the results page but turns out to be not so relevant when you visit the actual page. As a result, searchers frequently click results and then rapidly click back when they realize they aren't what they're looking for.''


According to Ms. Nadella, these problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a webpage. We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage. In doing so, Microsoft hopes to nnovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience. Microsoft will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better.

Working with its existing Search team and other Microsoft teams that focus on natural language, Powerset will help address all of those problems and opportunities.

Microsoft Research will have more to say about the things they are doing in understanding searches and webpages through natural language technology in the coming months.

Powerset's goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language. While this is a difficult challenge, we believe that now is the right time to begin the journey. Powerset is first applying its natural language processing to search, aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.

Powerset's first product is a search and discovery experience for Wikipedia, launched in May 2008. Powerset's technology improves the entire search process. In the search box, you can express yourself in keywords, phrases, or simple questions. On the search results page, Powerset gives more accurate results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles. Finally, Powerset's technology follows you into enhanced Wikipedia articles, giving you a better way to quickly digest and navigate content.

A San Francisco-based company, Powerset was founded in 2005 and is funded by Foundation Capital, Founders Fund, Paperboy Ventures, and a number of angel investors.

Live Search provides several ways to easily add search to web sites. The Live Search Box AJAX can quickly control adding search, or use the Live Search Web Service to add a more customized search engine.


To learn more about Powerset, please visit: www.powerset.com.

For more information about Live Search, please visit: www.live.com.




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