Screw Yahoo, Microsoft to buy Powerset?

[CoffeeShark]

Yahoo: $46 billion
Powerset: $100 million

Savings: um... 45 billion, 900 million. Not bad.

Microsoft is reportedly pursuing a purchase of Powerset, a 'semantic' web query engine that goes after searches in a different way than Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. (Or AOL for Denny).

Instead of crawling the net searching for words, Powerset's search is by context and usage, not just the existence of the word. You may have seen this a long time ago by "Ask Jeeves", which attempted a similar thing, but without success. Basically, a plain language search engine that gave you results, not based on words contained, but based on the how the words were used.

It's not a new idea, but I don't think it has ever been done right. Maybe Powerset has the right idea, maybe not. $100 million for Microsoft to find out isn't a large payout.

Try PowerSet search here. They're still in proving phase, so only Wikipedia is being indexed, which is the suck, but what can you do.

BusinessWeek

More on Powerset

[SonicSpeed]

Who?

[CmdrTulkas]

cool and interesting, but I know that you know that I know and everyone else knows that there is a lot more to yahoo than just a search engine

[CoffeeShark]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CmdrTulkas

cool and interesting, but I know that you know that I know and everyone else knows that there is a lot more to yahoo than just a search engine

yeah, but Microsoft was after search percentages. The rest would be a bonus.

[CmdrTulkas]

Seriously, I thought they would be after everything yahoo has to offer...online advertisements and all the companies they bought up , services they offer, and all the companies they bought up in China

But I guess this move by them shows otherwise...maybe that's why their deal never got done

[Craig]

i agree that there has to be a different way to search for newbs like our grandparents. Google is great, but really only that way if you know how to use all of the special tricks.

Jeeves was pretty cool actually, it probably just needed some $$ behind it to keep it going and get it to a profitable place. MS is good at that.

[FuzzyLogik]

interesting, never heard of it.

[Tao]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoffeeShark

Maybe Powerset has the right idea, maybe not. $100 million for Microsoft to find out isn't a large payout.

May not be a huge acquisition for MS...but I'm certain $100MM looks pretty phat to Powerset's founders.

//note to self: start Internet tech company...sell it...get rich.

[CoffeeShark]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tao

//note to self: start Internet tech company...sell it...get rich.

let's not start that whole thing again

[Tao]

sans "tech stock bubble" of course...