Microsoft to buy semantic search engine Powerset for $100M plus(venturebeat.com)
venturebeat.com
Microsoft to buy semantic search engine Powerset for $100M plus
http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/26/microsoft-to-buy-semantic-search-engine-powerset-for-100m-plus/
66 comments
"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.
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.
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.
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.
We're in a recession, I don't blame them for taking what they can get.
Eh, you're not Microsoft, it seems.
PG: "sell"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186487
congrats @KirinDave : http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KirinDave
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186487
congrats @KirinDave : http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KirinDave
46 days ago, I posted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=186752
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 )?
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 )?
http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennisplayer-beat-a...
"Sorry, there were no results for your query: which tennisplayer beat andre agassi"
"Sorry, there were no results for your query: which tennisplayer beat andre agassi"
try tennis player:
http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/which-tennis-player-beat-...
that is pretty awful and funny though. it can do all that but not see that tennis player and tennisplayer is the same thing :)
that is pretty awful and funny though. it can do all that but not see that tennis player and tennisplayer is the same thing :)
Spelling correction isn't exactly the problem they set out to solve, nor is it one that they will have trouble implementing themselves or solving via a third party tool.
It's nice to see someone actually using the site a little before proclaiming "Wikipedia already has a search, so their site is fail." So thank you. :)
But is scalability a computational complexity problem for you? Or you think you can search the whole web like that?
Moore's law and general improvements to the software mean that even if our algorithm is as expensive as people think it is, we'd be fine.
That said, scaling it isn't trivial and I don't want to sound overly dismissive. :)
I firmly believe that we can search the whole web this way, but Powerset doesn't have the hardware assets at the time I write this post to do the whole web (or we would have done it).
That said, scaling it isn't trivial and I don't want to sound overly dismissive. :)
I firmly believe that we can search the whole web this way, but Powerset doesn't have the hardware assets at the time I write this post to do the whole web (or we would have done it).
I'm not sure you can pull the Moore's Law card in this case, since I imagine the size of the web has grown at least as fast as processors have improved.
I can't say I know how fast the web is growing. I do have some idea of how fast Yahoo! and Google's search indicies are growing, and they aren't that exponential curve.
It's never going to be the case that the PARC algorithm we use will be as fast as Google's algorithm. There is simply a lot more work to do, so they stay a fixed width apart.
But the way that the industry looks at computing resources has changed a lot since when Google is founded. They're becoming a commodity to the point where you can rent CPUs on a hourly basis. Also, there are new kinds of hardware that are starting to be tapped (for example, over the last few years graphics cards have become more and more a platform for general parallelized computation) that make the task seem feasible.
It's never going to be the case that the PARC algorithm we use will be as fast as Google's algorithm. There is simply a lot more work to do, so they stay a fixed width apart.
But the way that the industry looks at computing resources has changed a lot since when Google is founded. They're becoming a commodity to the point where you can rent CPUs on a hourly basis. Also, there are new kinds of hardware that are starting to be tapped (for example, over the last few years graphics cards have become more and more a platform for general parallelized computation) that make the task seem feasible.
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.
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.
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.
Either that or it was a useful way to limit the search space to make an easier problem.
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.
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.
I think people are missing the point here...
Even just with the Powerset dataset, Microsoft now owns a significant number of concepts and the semantics and context that bind then. Without much effort, they can easily use this to improve the quality of their rankings simply by giving them a yard stick to compare to.
Is this page that talks about "flags" relevant to programmers or to heraldic buffs? Just check which Wikipedia page it compares better with.
With a lot of work by a lot of smart people this could become the first step in the long road to the much fangled "Semantic web"... or at least, some type of semantic search. Frankly, I'm surprised Google didn't buy them first. Unless they're already working on something similar.
Even just with the Powerset dataset, Microsoft now owns a significant number of concepts and the semantics and context that bind then. Without much effort, they can easily use this to improve the quality of their rankings simply by giving them a yard stick to compare to.
Is this page that talks about "flags" relevant to programmers or to heraldic buffs? Just check which Wikipedia page it compares better with.
With a lot of work by a lot of smart people this could become the first step in the long road to the much fangled "Semantic web"... or at least, some type of semantic search. Frankly, I'm surprised Google didn't buy them first. Unless they're already working on something similar.
Oh boy, I can now search through Wikipedia to my heart's content at Live.com
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?
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?
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.
Ask me about the time I interviewed with a live.com team, and asked that very question. They Were Not Amused (tm).
So, um, I'd love to know the answer to that question. Did they tell you? Or is it a trade secret?
Heh. There was no answer, per se...just some scowling (Also, I didn't get the job, but that might not have been related).
To be fair, there were some cool people in the group who knew the time of day -- one (very senior) fellow asked me point blank to enumerate the problems in Microsoft's online products, and was very intent on making sure that I defended my criticisms. We ended up having a really nice, long conversation about things like the shutdown of the IE team, and other blunders (such as the choice of "live.com" branding).
I think the closest thing I got to an answer, was that the decision came down from on high. There's something like 11 levels of management at Microsoft today; based on what I've seen and heard, the politics of that structure can overwhelm good taste.
To be fair, there were some cool people in the group who knew the time of day -- one (very senior) fellow asked me point blank to enumerate the problems in Microsoft's online products, and was very intent on making sure that I defended my criticisms. We ended up having a really nice, long conversation about things like the shutdown of the IE team, and other blunders (such as the choice of "live.com" branding).
I think the closest thing I got to an answer, was that the decision came down from on high. There's something like 11 levels of management at Microsoft today; based on what I've seen and heard, the politics of that structure can overwhelm good taste.
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.
I don't know why they dropped the "Windows" part from the name though.
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.
Live seems more of a name for streaming video or something though rather than search.
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?
But at this point, is it worth 100 mil?
of course not IMHO, but MS are desperate, and can't create things on their own any more.
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!
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 $$$ into development, they don't have the experience and search data Google acquired during the years of their algorithms battling with search engine spammers.
At this point, it is practically impossible to catch up, so MSFT seems to try alternative approaches - the problem is that that is not any easier, and nobody showed anything substantial yet.
It seems to me that MSFT is somewhat afraid that they already lost the race with Google in the area of general search. Even if they pour lot of $$$ 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.
s/Google/Microsoft/
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).
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.
I read that Powerset is using Ruby and a little Erlang and I guess other languages too.
Don't worry Live search will still be awful. Congrats to the Powerset team though.
Congrats for what?
Getting bought before they could completely implode on themselves?
Getting bought before they could completely implode on themselves?
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.
I'm assuming congrats for the $100m. That's something to be proud of.
Implode?
You must have one killer insider source to make claims like this despite the fact that the blogosphere is abuzz with unconfirmed reports of acquisition!
You must have one killer insider source to make claims like this despite the fact that the blogosphere is abuzz with unconfirmed reports of acquisition!
[deleted]
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.
If by worthless you mean making $14 billion last year than you are right.
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:MSF...
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:MSF...
You should buy stock in a company you think will grow. The two main components of MS are set to shrink drastically.
Stock in a dinosaur is worthless.
Stock in a dinosaur is worthless.
I won't put words in his mouth, but maybe he means worthless as in their products and technology are becoming more and more merely laughingstocks. M$ was a lucky lottery winner, leveraged their winnings via unethical business practices, and now is imploding.
they leave a negative impression in the minds of many smart developers"
They also have a lot of smart developers working for them ;)
They also have a lot of smart developers working for them ;)
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.
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.
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?"
On the plus side, this could one day answer the question "What's Live really better than Google at?"
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...
screenshot http://img.skitch.com/20080627-xwau72gij1yse6t6fy1rp3us3j.pn...
You're right.. think i just scanned the page titles. and someone needs to update that article with '17' finals wins.
I wonder what Microsoft were looking to gain from this.
I could think of better was to spend a $100M
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.