Meaningful acquisition for Microsoft

2nd July 2008

Microsoft has confirmed it is to buy semantic search engine Powerset.

Following days of speculation over the transaction, Microsoft senior vice-president of search, portal and advertising Satya Nadella revealed in a Live Search blog post that the San Francisco company will join Microsoft's Search Relevance team.

Powerset's search technology examines search query meanings and attempts to deliver the most relevant listings as a result.

The company was founded three years ago and most recently put out a search facility for use with Wikipedia.

"Problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a web page," Mr Nadella said.

"We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a web page."

The New York Times states that Microsoft has spent about $8 billion on acquisitions related to the internet industry in the last two years.