Microsoft purchases search company, just not the one you think

In an apparent attempt to boost it’s rather floundering search presence on the Net, Microsoft announced its plan to purchase the relatively unknown company Powerset. This startup company has developed semantic search technology based upon natural language processing.

What this type of software does is use specific linguistic algorithms to determine what certain queries submitted to the engine mean, and then formulates answers based on data existing in a knowledge repository. Wikipedia is the repository used by Powerset. Personally, I don’t know…this could be a good or bad thing considering Joe Schmoe public writes Wikipedia. Founded by CEO Barney Pell, COO Steve Newcomb and Product Architect Lorenzo Thione, Powerset is a Silicon Valley company that was first launched in 2006.