With the failure of the Yahoo acquisition, Microsoft is at it again. This time they managed to biy the search engine Powerset for $100 million. I introduced Powerset several weeks ago as a possible future competitor to Google (Is Google in trouble?). With the power of Microsoft backing them, Google may very well have a run for their money. Google on the other hand scuffed the idea of semantic search, saying that there was no future for it. I still believe that a natural language semantic search is the way of the future. Only the future will tell.