Powerset to be acquired by Microsoft for $100 million: Rumor?

Rumors over Microsoft’s keenness to get its hands at Powerset have been winding up for the last month or so, ever since the announcement of such a possibility by Dan Ferber.

Presently Venturebeat reported that Microsoft might just be nearing an acquisition of the San Francisco based semantic search engine for a hefty amount of $100 million. Although the report sounds more of a rumor since none of the parties has yet confirmed of the announcement; as Microsoft said that ‘it does not comment on speculations’.

Microsoft is interested in using Powerset’s underlying technology of its search system to integrate it for its own search products like Live Search. The speciality of Powerset is that it provides answers in a natural language. This was originally licensed from Xerox PARC.

What could this deal do to make a difference for Powerset? Change its very present and might just expand is beyond what Wikipedia is with more indexing over the Net. With a system that is yet to be proven to work well beyond anything but Wikipedia, this acquisition could very well have it go further than Google’s key-word driven search. Why would that happen? Well users would prefer a more direct answer to their questions instead of browsing over websites that match their keywords.

With Google dwarfing every other search engine; having a 70% share of the search market with MSN/Live Search strangling at 9.5%; Powerset with its potential has been receiving quite a lot of positive feedbacks and is discussed technique can very well overshadow Google’s method of search and show results.

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