Lord of the Web

After the failed attempt at buying Yahoo, software giant Microsoft has turned to other companies that it hopes may give it an advantage over search engine market leader Google.

Microsoft has announced that its buying Powerset, developer of what it hopes is a smarter way to search the Web. Powerset uses its “semantic Web” technology that brings up results based on an understanding of a word’s meaning and the context of its use. This in contrast to the method used by the major search engines, which work primarily by matching words in queries to those on Web pages. Powerset’s system analyzes the actual meaning of words and phrases that it indexes on the Web and then analyzes the linguistic meaning of the query and find the best matches between the two—theoretically, at least, producing more meaningful results.

Reportedly Microsoft has offered more than $100 million to acquire the company. However,the purchase price has not been disclosed.

The purchase could give Microsoft a big leg up in its efforts to catch Google. Powerset and other semantic search engines are known to outperform Google in some cases .

What’s more, semantic search wouldn’t be easy for Google to replicate. Large search engines, such as Google and Microsoft, have already scanned and indexed many of the pages on the Web. So their machines can concentrate efforts on analyzing the several million new Web sites created every year and adding them to their records. Adopting semantic search technology would require the big guys, in essence, to start from the beginning—rescanning every Web page according to the technology’s fundamentally different method of analyzing and classifying Web pages.

Of course, Microsoft would have to rescan all its pages, too. But with just a portion of the $46 billion it was willing to pay for Yahoo, Microsoft could invest in the necessary equipment, such as the servers needed to scan and “read” all those pages. Plus, it has the underdog’s willingness to take on risk and expense in hopes of finally generating search results that can rival Google’s.

Visit powerset at http://www.powerset.com