Word of the acquisition first surfaced last week. Today, Microsoft confirms the San Francisco natural language search company will become part of its “Search Relevance team.” The announcement at Microsoft’s Live Search blog seems to imply that most, if not all, of the Powerset team will survive the transition.

Powerset focuses on understanding full sentences and actual context of search queries as opposed to the typical keyword-driven approach.

“… Problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a webpage,” Satya Nadella, senior VP of Microsoft search, portal, and advertising, explains. “We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage.”

As The Inquisitr initially noted, however, the technology has only been put to use for searching Wikipedia articles — so we’ll have to wait and see how well it actually applies to web-wide applications.

Related posts:

1. Can Powerset Save Microsoft Search?
2. Microsoft Gives Up Digitizing of Libraries
3. Powerset Launches: Ask Jeeves 2.0