Krishna Srinivasan’s Blog

As rumored last week, Microsoft, with the notion of a Yahoo deal receding quickly in the rear-view mirror, is taking another tack in its efforts to stem the dominance of Google search — rather than playing catch up, it wants to try leapfrog. Today, Microsoft confirmed an agreement to buy Powerset, one of the leaders in semantic search, which attempts to glean the context and intent of a search rather than just matching keywords against the content of ranked pages. Details of the deal weren’t revealed, but the price is rumored to be in the $100 million neighborhood. “We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there,” Microsoft’s Live Search blog said. “We came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision. That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.”

There are challenges aplenty in the strategy. Semantic search is a non-trivial exercise involving the honing of the technology and the re-indexing of the searchable Web, and semantic analysis of a page is much more computing-intensive than simply scanning text. On its own, Powerset had been limited to demonstrating its proof of concept in searches through the finite world of Wikipedia. Microsoft has the infrastructure and the war chest to expand that reach, first, perhaps, in vertical search categories where semantic search has done the best so far. It will be a while before the success of this approach can be judged, and there’s always the chance that Google might innovate or buy its way into the same territory, but Microsoft needed to do something to try to pull its search share out of single digits, and this looks like as good a bet as any. “Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset makes perfect sense and is probably the best shot at a disruptive technology that might allow it to leapfrog Google,” said Andrei Hagiu, assistant professor of strategy, focusing on technology, at Harvard Business School.

Google continues to have a strong focus on search

All the time I hear things like “If Google doesn’t pay attention to search…” or “If Google loses its focus on search.” That’s not likely to happen, but let me explain why people might worry that Google will lose our focus on search.

- Something like Street View is splashy, cool, and easy to understand, so launches like that tend to get more coverage. It’s much easier for someone to write about a new product or feature than about how Google has improved its semantic understanding of the web, or when we get better at scoring documents. I love Street view, Google Gears, and mobile Calendar, by the way. I’m just using them as examples because they’re easy to understand and recent.
- We don’t always talk a ton about core search quality. Part of the reason is that some reporters are less interested in changes that can’t even be seen (”Google’s search just got a little better in Thai. You can’t see it, but it did!”). Sometimes core search is hard to get other people excited about — kinda like it’s hard to make a picture of someone working on a computer exciting. And sometimes as a business you don’t want to give hints to competitors about how you do things. I’ve got a funny story about “url.host” that I’ll tell someday. Maybe someone will ask me about it in the Q&A tomorrow at the conference.

What happens when you put these two trends together? People see media coverage on neat/wild/fun things that Google does, and they don’t read many stories about core search quality. From those two facts, they extrapolate to what seems like a reasonable conclusion: Google is focusing less on search. But that’s just not true. Hundreds of engineers pay attention to our search quality in ways big and small. Google is practically designed from the ground up so that we can’t lose that search focus. It’s natural to combine these two trends and come to the wrong conclusion. By giving a glimpse at what our search quality engineers do on a daily basis, this article dispels that misconception. read full article

Lately there’s been a swirl of buzz about Powerset, a stealth natural language processing search engine. Last week they released their first “Query of the week”. Today we discovered that Powerset is launching Powerlabs (screenshot below), plus we got our hands on a second query. read full article