The rumored pending acquisition of search engine maker Powerset by Microsoft is still not officially confirmed. The news was first leaked by VentureBeat on June 26. The online publication claimed that the purchase price will be more than $100 million.

Although there is no official confirmation, the move makes sense for Microsoft, whose CEO Steve Ballmer underlined that the most important thing for the foreseeable future is search. It appears that search engine king Google has determined that they are not very interested in semantic search and would rather focus on old fashioned search which most people use and have grown accustomed to.

The system manages to understand simple questions like “Who is “ or “What is,” but when moving to more complicated questions like asking it where one can find a species of plants or how one can make a simple device, it fails.

Powerset is a remarkably useful search engine that can be used just on the Wikipedia site and, seen as such, it offers a series of features that make it unique. The search results that are obtained with Powerset are consistently better than the ones obtained with Wikipedia’s own search engine.

Unfortunately, the feature that could have made Powerset more than a search engine, the ‘Factz’ feature is not working properly. The results are sometimes incoherent and funny as the system is not able to fully understand the meaning of the words used in human language. However, basic information about a subject is very well extracted, structured and presented.