July 3, 2008
Microsoft to acquire Powerset
On Monday, Microsoft and Powerset announced that Powerset is being acquired by Microsoft.
In terms of timing, the companies announced that the deal was signed. There is still the customary period before the deal is officially closed (at which point, I expect we’re going to have a great party).
I’m including, below, the text of the announcements from the blogs of Powerset andMicrosoft.
I think these sum up pretty well the logic behind the acquisition on both sides.
It took a lot of work by many people to make this happen. Most significant, of course, was the entire team at Powerset, who executed so well to build and launch a wonderful product that showed the world what is now possible.
Immediately following the announcement, we had a day of calls with members of the press, which resulted in a lot of coverage. I’ll try to post a collection of links next week.
One press meeting that I really enjoyed was a podcast with me, Ramez Naam (Group Program Manager for Microsoft Live Search), and Mike Arrington for TechCrunch. That link provides an article, transcript, and the full audio of the interview.
There is a lot more to say about Powerset, Microsoft, the acquisition, and what it means for the future of search, linguistic technology, semantic web, etc. I am excited to be staying on with Microsoft in a strategy and evangelist role and I am looking forward to the chance to talk and write a lot more about this, and from a whole new perspective, soon.
Here is the text of Powerset’s blog announcement:
We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset.Powerset has always been a small company with big dreams, with the ultimate goal of changing the way humans interact with computers through language. We set out to improve search by indexing Web pages based on the meaning expressed in them rather than just the literal words. Powerset licensed breakthrough technology from PARC, hired world-renowned computational linguists and search engineers, and recently released a search and discovery experience for Wikipedia articles. Our technology helps to improve search results and also makes new features possible, such as Factz, which aggregates information from many articles to summarize a topic.
With any startup, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company. At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale.
Microsoft shares our goal to improve search through deeper analysis of queries and documents, and understands that our technology and expertise will play a key role in the evolution of search. With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale. When we launched our first product, we heard: this is great, but when and how will we get Powerset to go beyond Wikpiedia? Microsoft accelerates our ability to move Powerset to the entire Web faster than anyone could have imagined.
Powerset will continue to operate much as we currently do, working in the same building, with the same organizational structure, and with the same uniquely talented and growing team (apply on our jobs page). We’ll continue to tackle the hardest problems in parsing, semantics, ranking, indexing, scalable computing, user experience and all of our other specialties. But now we’ll do it with the support of Microsoft and the vast resources of the entire Live Search team.
Over the past couple of years Powerset has made amazing progress. Starting with just a big idea, we licensed the best linguistic technology, recruited a top-notch team, built out our datacenter, engineered a world-class semantic search platform, tackled deep natural language issues, improved relevance, innovated an interface and launched a great product. So few start-ups ever tackle such deep, scientific problems successfully and create the kind of value we’ve delivered in such short order.
For now, Powerset.com will continue to host our Wikipedia Search & Discovery and we’ll be continuing to experiment with our product, based on user feedback. But, expect many announcements from us in the coming months about how we’re integrating our technology and features into Live Search.
And here’s the text of Microsoft’s blog announcement:
Powerset joins Live SearchWe’re excited to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.
Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.
More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).
We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — 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.
We know today that roughly a third of searches don’t get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this:
* Differences in phrasing or context between a user’s search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages. Search engines don’t understand today that “shrub” and “tree” are similar concepts. We don’t understand that “cancer” sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which.
* Lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results. Sometimes a result looks relevant from its short description on the results page but turns out to be not so relevant when you visit the actual page. As a result, searchers frequently click results and then rapidly click back when they realize they aren’t what they’re looking for.These problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a webpage. We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage. Doing so, we can innovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience. We will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better.
Working with our existing Search team and other Microsoft teams that focus on natural language, Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities.
We’re looking to add even more talented engineers to the San Francisco team to accelerate our shared progress. If you’re interested in joining the team, drop us a line.
We’ll have more to say about the things we’re doing in understanding searches and webpages through natural language technology in the coming months. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Powerset to Microsoft!
Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising
Posted by barney at 3:50 pm | No Comments
June 22, 2008
Talin’s 50th Birthday Party
Last night I hosted a party for my good friend Talin, to celebrate his 50th birthday. Talin had notified people that he had a surprise theme for the party, which turned out to be a social experiment. Talin contributed a pile of $100 bills, one for each year of his life, and said that the only rule was that the group of attendees had to figure out how to spend it before midnight. They even had to figure out the process by which the decisions would be made.
In the end, after hours of partying mixed with negotiation and philosophizing, the money was allocated approximately as follows:
- $2000 to be spent on microfinance loans (each person would spend $100).
- $1000 on a program to stimulate Talin’s dating life in the short and long term.
- $1200 donation for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (to be matched by Google).
- $400 to buy Talin a Kindle reader, including an e-book version of The Game, by Neil Strauss, which is required reading for Talin’s dating life enhancement program.
- $400 to pay the caterers for who brought the yummy and nearly endless supply of dim sum.
Mike Arrington attended the party, his first time at Barney’s house, and was surprised to find how few of Talin’s friends read TechCrunch, but despite that he had a great time.
The whole photo set is here.
Posted by barney at 1:26 pm | No Comments
May 11, 2008
Powerset launched today!
Sunday 5/11/2008: Powerset has launched our first open product to the world!
Our initial product offers users a whole new way to experience Wikipedia and Freebase content, based on our unique natural language understanding technology.
A write-up about Powersets Wikipedia product is available on the Powerset blog.
I will write more over the next few days about the product and it’s role in the ecosystem of search, content, linguistics, and semantic technology, but for now I’m just incredibly excited. I’ll just note a couple highlights from the evening.
We were planning to launch at 9pm PST. But in an unusual twist for a software company, one of our eager engineers actually flipped the switch to make everything live 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Since everything was working, we just decided to go with it!
Within the next couple of hours, the first press articles came out. Pretty much across the board, the journalists and bloggers captured the essence of our initial product. They got what was special about it, and also recognized it for the initial step that this represents (finally freeing us of the Google Killer hype that is impossible for a small startup to live up to).
Within 1 hour of launch, we received a note from a VC asking about possible investment in the company.
And 2 hours after we were live, we had our first denial of service attack. An automated script sent a never-ending sequence of bizarre queries at our system. Fortunately, our own engineers had been preparing for this kind of thing already and we managed to stay up and weather the storm.
The whole company was gathered in the office. We spent time alternating between: making speeches and toasts, reading press articles, looking at the traffic and load, and watching the initial queries float by. The last part was the most exciting: real users and real queries!
Since we launched on Sunday night on Mother’s day (thanks, Mom!), we had it pretty easy with relatively light traffic. I think Monday is going to be an exciting day.
Posted by barney at 11:59 am | No Comments
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