Venture Beat reports that PowerSet just got purchased by Microsoft for $100M:
Powerset, of San Francisco, has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching, and it returns results based on that understanding.By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine. The move comes as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to argue that improving search is Microsoft’s most important task. Microsoft’s market share in search has steadily declined, dropping further and further behind first-place Google and second place Yahoo.
Congrats to the PowerSet team...makes me wonder what a company that crawls and indexes the entire web, not just one site, is worth...hmmm.
UPDATE:TechCrunch says not so fast...
UPDATE #2: And we're done...