Confirmed: Microsoft Buys Powerset

Microsoft has confirmed ^[1] that it has acquired natural language search engine Powerset ^[2]. In announcing the deal ^[3], Powerset’s Mark Johnson affirmed much of our analysis yesterday ^[4] 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 ^[5] reported that the deal was likely to be in the $100 million range.

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URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/07/01/confirmed-microsoft-buys-powerset/

URLs in this post:

[1] has confirmed: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/07/01/powerset-joins-live-search.aspx

[2] Powerset: http://www.powerset.com

[3] announcing the deal: http://www.powerset.com/blog/articles/2008/07/01/microsoft-to-acquire-powerset

[4] analysis yesterday: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jun/30/microsoft-powerset_all_about_the_data_centers.html

[5] Venture Beat: http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/26/microsoft-to-buy-semantic-search-engine-powerset-for-100m-plus/

[6] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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