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.

There is a new search engine out there, which if it gets big could spell trouble for Google. Powerset is a “natural language” search engine, which means it knows the meaning of a page (in a way), so you can search in the form of a question. While search engines such as Ask clime to do this, they actually index pages by key words. If you were to ask the question, “What is Henry the 8th’s birthday?” Google would search for the key words Henr and birthday. Powerset on the other hand, knows that you want to know the birthday of Henry the 8th and displays a quick answer. Another great feature of Powerset is that it displays the resulting search page from within there search engine. What this does is give them control of more feature such as an outline of the contents of the page. In side-by-side comparisons of Powerset and Google, Powerset has a slight lead. There is a down side to Powerset, it is in testing, and only searches Wikipedia. Therefore, if you are doing a research project and are using the internet, Powerset may be the way to go. I hope this “natural language” idea catches on and Google adapts it. It could only make surfing the internet that much easier! For more check out powerset’s website.