
Microsoft to buy semantic search engine Powerset for $100M plus - ajbatac
http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/26/microsoft-to-buy-semantic-search-engine-powerset-for-100m-plus/
======
staunch
A very low price if they really believed all the hot air they were pumping
out. It's an implicit admission by Powerset's management and board that they
didn't genuinely believe they were about to do something extraordinary.

It was already pretty obvious that Microsoft is so braindead these days that
they'll spend hundreds of millions for the mere appearance of being able to
compete with Google in internet technology. I suppose if their stock stays up
an extra $100 million it sort of pays for itself.

~~~
pchristensen
"A very low price if they really believed all the hot air they were pumping
out"

If Powerset sells for $100M, then they clearly don't believe their own hot
air. I'd be very nervous if someone accepted an offer for much less than they
claimed to be worth.

~~~
bluelu
In my opinion they were simply running out of money and have no business model
whatsoever.

100 Million is still a lot of money for something that only searches
wikipedia.

With 100 million $ you could hire some of the brigthest engineers around the
world and build this in less in a year.

------
wumi
_PG: "sell"_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186487>

congrats @KirinDave : <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KirinDave>

------
prakash
46 days ago, I posted this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186752>

------
schtog
At first I thought Powerset was nothing since it only searched Wikipedia and
the normal wikipedia search works fine.

However if you really use it the right way, asking questions of the type
"which tennisplayer beat andre agassi" which is an example I saw somewhere
then you see the power.

I am hardly an expert but I guess the problem is that the monetizeable part of
search is the easiest search, keyword search. And beating Google there, well
good luck...

And the search that Powerset does so well isn't as easy to monetarize.

So as someone said, the best way for them to make money might be through
licensing.

I guess there wont be one form of search to rule them all(nor have there ever
been) but many different ways of search coexisting and cooperating.

One thing I wonder is, is the scalability a money-issue, ie can they buy
truckloads of servers and index the whole web with their technique or could
their algorhitms simply be too complex to scale, ie NP-complete(
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity> ,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete> )?

~~~
mynameishere
[http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennisplayer-
beat-a...](http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennisplayer-beat-andre-
agassi)

"Sorry, there were no results for your query: which tennisplayer beat andre
agassi"

~~~
schtog
try tennis player: [http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennis-player-
beat-...](http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennis-player-beat-andre-
agassi)

that is pretty awful and funny though. it can do all that but not see that
tennis player and tennisplayer is the same thing :)

------
cousin_it
I haven't seen any convincing use case for Powerset over Google. Is the
acquisition just a talent grab by Microsoft? $100MM sounds too high for that.

------
gunderson
Think about it this way:

Powerset only indexed wikipedia. Why? Probably b/c scaling is somewhat hard.
Microsoft can help with that, and if there are any short-term gains to using
some of Powerset's technology on msn search, all the better.

Also, as the article points out, $100M is a bargain.

~~~
pchristensen
Either that or it was a useful way to limit the search space to make an easier
problem.

~~~
KirinDave
Want some real info?

You're partially right, but only in a very broad sense. One of the really ugly
problems with web search is identifying real content from meaningless crap,
and wikipedia rather nicely gets rid of nearly all the extraneous stuff, or
boxes it in.

The actual semantics stuff is pretty robust, but like any piece of software
can be tuned to get incrementally better results on any corpus.

Really, one of the major reasons we started with Wikipedia is that we wanted
to build out the core search infrastructure and website infrastructure. These
are non-trivial things to do while also setting up a search interface thats
suitable for public consumption. I'm sure you can find a longtime powerlabs
user to tell you how far we went in the interface and speed department.

------
alaskamiller
Oh boy, I can now search through Wikipedia to my heart's content at Live.com

~~~
aneesh
Well, the mere fact that you know what Live.com is will make Microsoft happy.

Frankly, Microsoft has done a bad job with branding, and I still think most
people don't even know that Live is Micrsoft's search engine. What happened to
MSN being the brand?

~~~
alaskamiller
I still don't quite get how Live is related to search either. Is it live? Or
is it cause it lives to search? I don't get it.

~~~
timr
Ask me about the time I interviewed with a live.com team, and asked that very
question. They Were Not Amused (tm).

~~~
PieSquared
So, um, I'd love to know the answer to that question. Did they tell you? Or is
it a trade secret?

~~~
mlinsey
In between being called "MSN" and "Live", it was "Windows Live". The idea was
that MSN was a brand more oriented toward being an ISP or a portal (back when
it looked like the internet companies to beat were AOL and Yahoo), and this
re-branding would distance themselves from being either of those, and also
help them leverage the Windows brand.

I don't know why they dropped the "Windows" part from the name though.

~~~
axod
Probably because most people hate windows and consider it buggy and not very
good?

Live seems more of a name for streaming video or something though rather than
search.

------
aj
Is it worth it? Powerset has not displayed any really good improvement and
many of the queries return irrelevant results currently. Maybe in the future
it might be much better.

But at this point, is it worth 100 mil?

~~~
axod
of course not IMHO, but MS are desperate, and can't create things on their own
any more.

------
petercooper
I totally believe and agree in taking the money, but if Powerset is really
bought by Google, they've just become irrelevant and are definitely not the
"next big thing" in search. If the founders get a happy ending with the cash
though, it's still an excellent deal.. so congratulations!

~~~
greyman
I don't think Google would be interested...they (Powerset) don't seems to have
anything substantial yet.

It seems to me that MSFT is somewhat afraid that they already lost the race
with Google in the area of general search. Even if they pour lot of $$$ into
development, they don't have the experience and search data Google acquired
during the years of their algorithms battling with search engine spammers.

At this point, it is practically impossible to catch up, so MSFT seems to try
alternative approaches - the problem is that that is not any easier, and
nobody showed anything substantial yet.

------
smhinsey
I wonder what connection, if any, this has with their acquisition of FAST
Search & Transfer. FAST has always been relatively weak on the semantic side,
but the technology stack is completely different from what I imagine Powerset
is running (they're java & python).

~~~
mleonhard
Maybe Microsoft can use Powerset's search technology to increase the value of
FAST Search to third parties? They could also improve Sharepoint's search a
lot. It seems like it should be easier to tweak the Powerset algorithms for
searching company documents than searching the Web.

------
fallentimes
Don't worry Live search will still be awful. Congrats to the Powerset team
though.

~~~
mikeryan
Congrats for what?

Getting bought before they could completely implode on themselves?

~~~
tx
What's with the sarcasm? At least they shot at something not pathetically
trivial, like sending "up to" 400 bytes of text to random people. Or selling a
few percent of message board technology to the same restless company ran by an
idiot for $250M.

------
ivankirigin
I can't believe that PR startup actually got bought. MS Office is in the
process of crashing down, their OS is a zombie, and they leave a negative
impression in the minds of many smart developers. MSFT is worthless.

~~~
antiismist
If by worthless you mean making $14 billion last year than you are right.

[http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:MSF...](http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:MSFT)

~~~
ivankirigin
You should buy stock in a company you think will grow. The two main components
of MS are set to shrink drastically.

Stock in a dinosaur is worthless.

~~~
blader
It's worth about $27 a share, by definition.

------
theoneill
This deal means Powerset's investors had given up on them. The valuation after
their last round was 42.5m. No VC will accept a return of a mere 2x if there's
an alternative.

~~~
bluelu
They were running out of money :-)

------
henning
Those very vocal Ruby people who are the de facto face of Powerset developers
(KirinDave et al.) will apparently be Microsofties now.

Run, guys! Run for the Bay Area/Valley!

~~~
j2d2
Ruby with MSFT makes sense just as Python with Google makes sense. ;)

------
eyudkowsky
Microsoft doesn't have much of a choice if they ever want to challenge Google
- they have to buy whatever they're offered in this space.

------
naveenj82
Is Powerset anything more than a proof of concept? Not one of the results for
my search "which team has the most NBA championship wins?" had anything about
the Boston celtics. MSFT has major challenges ahead to successfully apply
Powerset over the entire www.

On the plus side, this could one day answer the question "What's Live really
better than Google at?"

~~~
tobys
Not sure why you said none of the results for your search had anything about
the Celtics. The third result's snippet basically answers the query - "The
Boston Celtics have won the most championships, with 16 NBA Finals wins"

screenshot
[http://img.skitch.com/20080627-xwau72gij1yse6t6fy1rp3us3j.pn...](http://img.skitch.com/20080627-xwau72gij1yse6t6fy1rp3us3j.png)

~~~
naveenj82
You're right.. think i just scanned the page titles. and someone needs to
update that article with '17' finals wins.

------
gms
I wonder what Microsoft were looking to gain from this.

------
metatronscube
I could think of better was to spend a $100M

------
__
Google is terrified, no doubt.

~~~
ajbatac
Don't think so. They're still king of ads. Remember?

