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In an apparent attempt to boost it’s rather floundering search presence on the Net, Microsoft announced its plan to purchase the relatively unknown company Powerset.  This startup company has developed semantic search technology based upon natural language processing.

What this type of software does is use specific linguistic algorithms to determine what certain queries submitted to the engine mean, and then formulates answers based on data existing in a knowledge repository. Wikipedia is the repository used by Powerset. Personally, I don’t know…this could be a good or bad thing considering Joe Schmoe public writes Wikipedia. Founded by CEO Barney Pell, COO Steve Newcomb and Product Architect Lorenzo Thione, Powerset is a Silicon Valley company that was first launched in 2006.

Powerset is hoping and believing that constructing a platform and bringing in developers will save it from the fate of other search startups.”We are trying to challenge everything out there,” Newcomb said. He said the search companies like Kosmix had a 90 percent attrition in attention not long after their announcement.

“After a few blogstorms they die – it’s the dead cat bounce model. We want to launch with super passionate people – David versus Goliath people and with the people who can build products off of our platform.”

So, Microsoft loses its bid to nab Yahoo’s second-place search operation. It’s eating Google’s dust. I’m sure the guys sitting around table at Microsoft headquarters are crossing their fingers and hoping that Powerset indeed has the power to save them from disappearing into the black hole of search engines.

Read [NYTimes]