Microsoft to buy semantic search engine Powerset for $100M plus

http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/26/microsoft-to-buy-semantic-search-engine-powerset-for-100m-plus/

by ajbatac • 18 years ago

55 63 18 years ago

venturebeat.com

fallentimes• 18 years ago

Don't worry Live search will still be awful. Congrats to the Powerset team though.

mikeryan• 18 years ago

Congrats for what?

Getting bought before they could completely implode on themselves?

jonknee• 18 years ago

I'm assuming congrats for the $100m. That's something to be proud of.

KirinDave5• 18 years ago

Implode?

You must have one killer insider source to make claims like this despite the fact that the blogosphere is abuzz with unconfirmed reports of acquisition!

tx2• 18 years ago

What's with the sarcasm? At least they shot at something not pathetically trivial, like sending "up to" 400 bytes of text to random people. Or selling a few percent of message board technology to the same restless company ran by an idiot for $250M.

cousin_it• 18 years ago

I haven't seen any convincing use case for Powerset over Google. Is the acquisition just a talent grab by Microsoft? $100MM sounds too high for that.

henning• 18 years ago

Those very vocal Ruby people who are the de facto face of Powerset developers (KirinDave et al.) will apparently be Microsofties now.

Run, guys! Run for the Bay Area/Valley!

j2d2• 18 years ago

Ruby with MSFT makes sense just as Python with Google makes sense. ;)

prakash• 18 years ago

46 days ago, I posted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186752

gunderson• 18 years ago

Think about it this way:

Powerset only indexed wikipedia. Why? Probably b/c scaling is somewhat hard. Microsoft can help with that, and if there are any short-term gains to using some of Powerset's technology on msn search, all the better.

Also, as the article points out, $100M is a bargain.

pchristensen2• 18 years ago

Either that or it was a useful way to limit the search space to make an easier problem.

KirinDave5• 18 years ago

Want some real info?

You're partially right, but only in a very broad sense. One of the really ugly problems with web search is identifying real content from meaningless crap, and wikipedia rather nicely gets rid of nearly all the extraneous stuff, or boxes it in.

The actual semantics stuff is pretty robust, but like any piece of software can be tuned to get incrementally better results on any corpus.

Really, one of the major reasons we started with Wikipedia is that we wanted to build out the core search infrastructure and website infrastructure. These are non-trivial things to do while also setting up a search interface thats suitable for public consumption. I'm sure you can find a longtime powerlabs user to tell you how far we went in the interface and speed department.

Anon84• 18 years ago

I think people are missing the point here...

Even just with the Powerset dataset, Microsoft now owns a significant number of concepts and the semantics and context that bind then. Without much effort, they can easily use this to improve the quality of their rankings simply by giving them a yard stick to compare to.

Is this page that talks about "flags" relevant to programmers or to heraldic buffs? Just check which Wikipedia page it compares better with.

With a lot of work by a lot of smart people this could become the first step in the long road to the much fangled "Semantic web"... or at least, some type of semantic search. Frankly, I'm surprised Google didn't buy them first. Unless they're already working on something similar.

ivankirigin2• 18 years ago

I can't believe that PR startup actually got bought. MS Office is in the process of crashing down, their OS is a zombie, and they leave a negative impression in the minds of many smart developers. MSFT is worthless.

antiismist• 18 years ago

If by worthless you mean making $14 billion last year than you are right.

http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:MSF...

ivankirigin2• 18 years ago

You should buy stock in a company you think will grow. The two main components of MS are set to shrink drastically.

Stock in a dinosaur is worthless.

logjam• 18 years ago

I won't put words in his mouth, but maybe he means worthless as in their products and technology are becoming more and more merely laughingstocks. M$ was a lucky lottery winner, leveraged their winnings via unethical business practices, and now is imploding.

aneesh2• 18 years ago

they leave a negative impression in the minds of many smart developers"

They also have a lot of smart developers working for them ;)

tx2• 18 years ago

MS Office is crashing down? What world do you live in?

smhinsey• 18 years ago

I wonder what connection, if any, this has with their acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer. FAST has always been relatively weak on the semantic side, but the technology stack is completely different from what I imagine Powerset is running (they're java & python).

schtog4• 18 years ago

I read that Powerset is using Ruby and a little Erlang and I guess other languages too.

mleonhard• 18 years ago

Maybe Microsoft can use Powerset's search technology to increase the value of FAST Search to third parties? They could also improve Sharepoint's search a lot. It seems like it should be easier to tweak the Powerset algorithms for searching company documents than searching the Web.

wumi• 18 years ago

PG: "sell"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186487

congrats @KirinDave : http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KirinDave

alaskamiller2• 18 years ago

Oh boy, I can now search through Wikipedia to my heart's content at Live.com

aneesh2• 18 years ago

Well, the mere fact that you know what Live.com is will make Microsoft happy.

Frankly, Microsoft has done a bad job with branding, and I still think most people don't even know that Live is Micrsoft's search engine. What happened to MSN being the brand?

alaskamiller2• 18 years ago

I still don't quite get how Live is related to search either. Is it live? Or is it cause it lives to search? I don't get it.

__• 18 years ago

Google is terrified, no doubt.

ajbatac• 18 years ago

Don't think so. They're still king of ads. Remember?

schtog4• 18 years ago

At first I thought Powerset was nothing since it only searched Wikipedia and the normal wikipedia search works fine.

However if you really use it the right way, asking questions of the type "which tennisplayer beat andre agassi" which is an example I saw somewhere then you see the power.

I am hardly an expert but I guess the problem is that the monetizeable part of search is the easiest search, keyword search. And beating Google there, well good luck...

And the search that Powerset does so well isn't as easy to monetarize.

So as someone said, the best way for them to make money might be through licensing.

I guess there wont be one form of search to rule them all(nor have there ever been) but many different ways of search coexisting and cooperating.

One thing I wonder is, is the scalability a money-issue, ie can they buy truckloads of servers and index the whole web with their technique or could their algorhitms simply be too complex to scale, ie NP-complete( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete )?

KirinDave5• 18 years ago

It's nice to see someone actually using the site a little before proclaiming "Wikipedia already has a search, so their site is fail." So thank you. :)

schtog4• 18 years ago

But is scalability a computational complexity problem for you? Or you think you can search the whole web like that?

mynameishere• 18 years ago

http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennisplayer-beat-a...

"Sorry, there were no results for your query: which tennisplayer beat andre agassi"

schtog4• 18 years ago

try tennis player: http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennis-player-beat-...

that is pretty awful and funny though. it can do all that but not see that tennis player and tennisplayer is the same thing :)

alexcharlie• 18 years ago

Spelling correction isn't exactly the problem they set out to solve, nor is it one that they will have trouble implementing themselves or solving via a third party tool.

staunch• 18 years ago

A very low price if they really believed all the hot air they were pumping out. It's an implicit admission by Powerset's management and board that they didn't genuinely believe they were about to do something extraordinary.

It was already pretty obvious that Microsoft is so braindead these days that they'll spend hundreds of millions for the mere appearance of being able to compete with Google in internet technology. I suppose if their stock stays up an extra $100 million it sort of pays for itself.

pchristensen2• 18 years ago

"A very low price if they really believed all the hot air they were pumping out"

If Powerset sells for $100M, then they clearly don't believe their own hot air. I'd be very nervous if someone accepted an offer for much less than they claimed to be worth.

PieSquared2• 18 years ago

Eh, you're not Microsoft, it seems.

rms• 18 years ago

We're in a recession, I don't blame them for taking what they can get.

bluelu2• 18 years ago

In my opinion they were simply running out of money and have no business model whatsoever.

100 Million is still a lot of money for something that only searches wikipedia.

With 100 million $ you could hire some of the brigthest engineers around the world and build this in less in a year.

eyudkowsky• 18 years ago

Microsoft doesn't have much of a choice if they ever want to challenge Google - they have to buy whatever they're offered in this space.

theoneill• 18 years ago

This deal means Powerset's investors had given up on them. The valuation after their last round was 42.5m. No VC will accept a return of a mere 2x if there's an alternative.

bluelu2• 18 years ago

They were running out of money :-)

Retric• 18 years ago

It's a quick 2.35x return on investment which is not so it's more a question of risk. Take 2.34x now or risk 0 on 10x.

naveenj822• 18 years ago

Is Powerset anything more than a proof of concept? Not one of the results for my search "which team has the most NBA championship wins?" had anything about the Boston celtics. MSFT has major challenges ahead to successfully apply Powerset over the entire www.

On the plus side, this could one day answer the question "What's Live really better than Google at?"

tobys• 18 years ago

Not sure why you said none of the results for your search had anything about the Celtics. The third result's snippet basically answers the query - "The Boston Celtics have won the most championships, with 16 NBA Finals wins"

screenshot http://img.skitch.com/20080627-xwau72gij1yse6t6fy1rp3us3j.pn...

naveenj822• 18 years ago

You're right.. think i just scanned the page titles. and someone needs to update that article with '17' finals wins.

aj• 18 years ago

Is it worth it? Powerset has not displayed any really good improvement and many of the queries return irrelevant results currently. Maybe in the future it might be much better.

But at this point, is it worth 100 mil?

axod2• 18 years ago

of course not IMHO, but MS are desperate, and can't create things on their own any more.

petercooper2• 18 years ago

I totally believe and agree in taking the money, but if Powerset is really bought by Google, they've just become irrelevant and are definitely not the "next big thing" in search. If the founders get a happy ending with the cash though, it's still an excellent deal.. so congratulations!

greyman• 18 years ago

I don't think Google would be interested...they (Powerset) don't seems to have anything substantial yet.

It seems to me that MSFT is somewhat afraid that they already lost the race with Google in the area of general search. Even if they pour lot of $$$ into development, they don't have the experience and search data Google acquired during the years of their algorithms battling with search engine spammers.

At this point, it is practically impossible to catch up, so MSFT seems to try alternative approaches - the problem is that that is not any easier, and nobody showed anything substantial yet.

petercooper2• 18 years ago

s/Google/Microsoft/

metatronscube• 18 years ago

I could think of better was to spend a $100M

gms• 18 years ago

I wonder what Microsoft were looking to gain from this.

Microsoft to buy semantic search engine Powerset for $100M plus

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