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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 )?

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

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

That said, scaling it isn't trivial and I don't want to sound overly dismissive. :)

I firmly believe that we can search the whole web this way, but Powerset doesn't have the hardware assets at the time I write this post to do the whole web (or we would have done it).

It's never going to be the case that the PARC algorithm we use will be as fast as Google's algorithm. There is simply a lot more work to do, so they stay a fixed width apart.

But the way that the industry looks at computing resources has changed a lot since when Google is founded. They're becoming a commodity to the point where you can rent CPUs on a hourly basis. Also, there are new kinds of hardware that are starting to be tapped (for example, over the last few years graphics cards have become more and more a platform for general parallelized computation) that make the task seem feasible.

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.

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.

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.

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?

To be fair, there were some cool people in the group who knew the time of day -- one (very senior) fellow asked me point blank to enumerate the problems in Microsoft's online products, and was very intent on making sure that I defended my criticisms. We ended up having a really nice, long conversation about things like the shutdown of the IE team, and other blunders (such as the choice of "live.com" branding).

I think the closest thing I got to an answer, was that the decision came down from on high. There's something like 11 levels of management at Microsoft today; based on what I've seen and heard, the politics of that structure can overwhelm good taste.

I don't know why they dropped the "Windows" part from the name though.

Live seems more of a name for streaming video or something though rather than search.

But at this point, is it worth 100 mil?

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.

Getting bought before they could completely implode on themselves?

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!

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

Stock in a dinosaur is worthless.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...

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

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

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

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