Confirmed: Microsoft Buys Powerset

Microsoft has confirmed that it has acquired natural language search engine Powerset. In announcing the deal, Powerset’s Mark Johnson affirmed much of our analysis yesterday about how a Microsoft-Powerset deal could accelerate the completion of a semantic index:

With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale. The biggest feedback that we got when we launched our first product was: this is great, but when and how will we get Powerset go beyond Wikpiedia? Microsoft accelerates our ability to move Powerset to the entire web faster than anyone could have imagined.

No price was mentioned in the announcements. Venture Beat reported that the deal was likely to be in the $100 million range.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.