Microsoft's Powerset to Revolutionize Search

Natural language search isn't just about the query or how people express them in a search engine (though that's certainly important). Because Powerset reads and derives meaning out of every sentence, we enable all sorts of new features that weren't possible before. For example, check out our Factz by typing in a simple keyword query (try a famous person, like Henry VII) and look at all of the information we extracted about Henry VIII from across Wikipedia articles. This just isn't possible with keyword search technology. You'll see lots of features like this popping up because of the deep processing we do to documents.

Cheers,
Mark Johnson, Powerset Product Manager

Trying to work out the intention behind the phrases entered into a search box is incredibly difficult. There's nothing in the AI/NLP/semantic web toolbox that helps much because intentions are either 'keyword-obvious' [eg Boston late availability] or are not fully captured in the structure of a sentence. And even if people could be persuaded to search in well formed sentences it woud still not improve matters because the content being searched is not sufficiently structured to provide positive feedback (ie good results) to sentence-searchers.

Congratulations to Barney Pell for spotting the potential for a semantic flip company. However there's no reason to think that the acquisition of Powerset will have any impact on Microsoft's market share of search related advertising

I certainly vote in favor of NLP or semantic based searches, not only with regard to streamlining the right ads, MS could use Powerset to enable a lot more search on the web pages and get customised outputs which could be specific for a field. Whereas google depends mainly on trail and error; many a times results in erroneous or non-essential hits, it may work in favor of Powerset to get the most accurate hits. Something similar works in the application/product that I have created check out :: www.xtractor.in