Powerset

We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset.

Powerset has always been a small company with big dreams, with the ultimate goal of changing the way humans interact with computers through language. We set out to improve search by indexing Web pages based on the meaning expressed in them rather than just the literal words. Powerset licensed breakthrough technology from PARC, hired world-renowned computational linguists and search engineers, and recently released a search and discovery experience for Wikipedia articles. Our technology helps to improve search results and also makes new features possible, such as Factz, which aggregates information from many articles to summarize a topic.

With any startup, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company. At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale. 

Microsoft shares our goal to improve search through deeper analysis of queries and documents, and understands that our technology and expertise will play a key role in the evolution of search. With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale.   When we launched our first product, we heard: this is great, but when and how will we get Powerset to go beyond Wikpiedia?  Microsoft accelerates our ability to move Powerset to the entire Web faster than anyone could have imagined.

Powerset will continue to operate much as we currently do, working in the same building, with the same organizational structure, and with the same uniquely talented and growing team (apply on our jobs page). We’ll continue to tackle the hardest problems in parsing, semantics, ranking, indexing, scalable computing, user experience and all of our other specialties. But now we’ll do it with the support of Microsoft and the vast resources of the entire Live Search team. 

Over the past couple of years Powerset has made amazing progress. Starting with just a big idea, we licensed the best linguistic technology, recruited a top-notch team, built out our datacenter, engineered a world-class semantic search platform, tackled deep natural language issues, improved relevance, innovated an interface and launched a great product.  So few start-ups ever tackle such deep, scientific problems successfully and create the kind of value we’ve delivered in such short order.

For now, Powerset.com will continue to host our Wikipedia Search & Discovery and we’ll be continuing to experiment with our product, based on user feedback. But, expect many announcements from us in the coming months about how we’re integrating our technology and features into Live Search.

As always, if you’re a member of the press and would like to speak to someone from Powerset, please contact us at press@powerset.com.