Powerset, the semantic search engine that Microsoft acquired a while back, has now started powering Windows Live Search. The folks at Powerset conducted three experiments all of which seem to be a success. Firstly they tried to expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows some results. This was one area where live search was significantly lacking as topical queries such as musicians, albums, films etc didn’t showed any results in Live Search. This problem has been resolved by fetching in and displaying data from Freebase.
Other than this Powerset has now employed its semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles, since they used to get showed up on a large percentage of live search queries, the engineers at Powerset thought it to be a good idea to make Live Search respond to a wide variety of captions. Additionally the Powerset’s fact extraction has been used to summon up a list of related searches for a set of queries, which is similar to “related articles” that gets displayed on Powerset enhanced Wikipedia articles.
Speaking of semantically enhanced searches, Semantifind has also just enhanced Google to respond to semantic searches.
