Microsoft is a company with a winner’s mentality. This is
what keeps it going in its quest to be number one in its chosen domains of
activity. Just as everyone expected, not long after the announcement that a
partnership with Yahoo is no longer of interest, Microsoft presented its plans
for purchasing Powerset in its attempt to become the most popular search engine
in the world.
The company is sure that by acquiring Powerset it will be
able to offer a significantly better search platform, with a semantic Web
technology, which follows the words’ meaning and their context in order to
provide the best possible search results. This initiative could indeed turn out
to be a huge success, as other search engines such as Google’s and Yahoo’s work
by simply matching the requested words to the ones found on the Web pages.
According to the company’s estimates, about one-third of all
Web searches do not receive a proper answer, as a direct result of the problems
mentioned above. Microsoft plans to develop with Powerset’s help an engine
which will understand a significantly larger percentage of the searches’
intent, the words’ meaning and also the context of the users’ demands. The end
result should lead to a far better Web site search experience for users and of
course, massive financial gains for Microsoft.
Microsoft explained on one of its blog pages that it shares Powerset's
vision "to take search to the next level by adding understanding on the
intent and meaning behind the words in searches and Web pages."
On a similar note, InformationWeek quoted Powerset’s
co-founder and CTO Barney Pell, who said: "One of the questions is,
how is a company that's a small little startup like Powerset actually going to
bring that out to a large scale? With Microsoft, we've found the right partner.
The vision, the goals, and even the culture were really aligned."
The official announcement about the acquisition was made
yesterday, on July 1, and even though the company did not disclose the figures
involved in the merger, rumors have it that Microsoft paid more than $100 million
in order to close the deal. One thing is for sure, Microsoft made the smartest
move possible, deciding on spending just a bit of the enormous amount of $46
billion it was supposed to invest in the deal with Yahoo and now, it has the
technology, know-how and resources to turn the tables around and develop a
brand new successful product.
At this point,
Microsoft only represents a distant third among the search engine competitors,
with Google and Yahoo attracting the majority of users.
Over the last couple of years, Microsoft has spent close to
$8 billion with its strategy of Internet buyouts and another $500 million for
its internal development and growing processes. One of the most important deals
happened on April, 24 2008 when the company acquired Fast Search & Transfer,
a Norwegian based company with a similar search-engine activity, for $1.2
billion. Its efforts on finding new ways for improvement are very likely to
continue and as soon as more information about the development process will
surface, we will keep you posted.
