Powerset (company)
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| Founded | San Francisco, U.S. (2005) |
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| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Parent | Microsoft (as of August 1, 2008) |
| Website | www |
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
Powerset was working on building a natural language search engine that could find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword based search). For example, when confronted with a question like "Which U.S. state has the highest income tax?", conventional search engines ignore the question phrasing and instead do a search on the keywords "state", "highest", "income", and "tax". Powerset on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and return pages containing the answer.
The company was in the process of "building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web". The company has licensed natural language technology from PARC, the former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of using conversational phrases rather than keywords.
In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007. Business Week said: "The company hopes the site will marshal thousands of people to help build and improve its search engine before it goes public next year." Said The New York Times: "[Powerset Labs] goes far beyond the 'alpha' or 'beta' testing involved in most software projects, when users put a new product through rigorous testing to find its flaws. Powerset doesn’t have a product yet, but rather a collection of promising natural language technologies, which are the fruit of years of research at Xerox PARC."
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