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Microsoft has been trying to put itself in the driving seat by acquiring various services and Powerset was one attempt to better understand the content across the web and how search queries are put up. Stephen Shankland has pointed out at this acquisition being a revolution in the search business.

Satya Nadella SVP of Microsoft’s search, portal and advertising platform group addressed the Search Engine Strategies Conference said:

Specifically, the company believes examining a full sequence of user queries can lead to more useful results. Today, the company only keeps track of the immediately prior search, but often users use search engines to explore subject areas broadly.

What had been planned was to understand the intent of the users when they put up a search query and come up with a strategy to shape the search experience, tailoring the user’s needs. Microsoft is keen to push the accelerator in order to keep pace in the Search market that is led by a huge margin by Google and second placed Yahoo. Their efforts were thwarted when their bid to partner with Yahoo failed. Nadella pointed at taking advantage of ‘infection points’; which have more chances of growth that too significantly. He added:

If we come again and again with innovation that matters, we will have the opportunity to grow our volume and our share.

What sounds pretty discouraging is the fact that search queries put up a mere 10% in Microsoft’s share. The teaming with Powerset though doesn’t bring up a huge traffic but even those could come handy. The real thing that makes Powerset stand out and appear more than useful is that it is a natural language processing based search engine and as said above provides a far more effective way to understand the content of web pages and search queries. Microsoft plans at expanding its vision of the search to broader horizons and away from the generic modes available. Nadella said:

These are the domains where we have domain-specific task-oriented.

Let’s see how Microsoft molds Powerset to its advantage and how successful it turns out to be.