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.

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

Powerset sort-of launched in May, with a smart search service that only indexed Wikipedia and Freebase entries. In use, Powerset is like the original Ask Jeeves on speed, focusing on questions as opposed to keywords. For example, a question might be “who invented RSS.” Google returns various articles debating the subject, Powerset returns a list of actual results focused on the question. (I always thought it was Dave Winer, but apparently Netscape was involved, so I learned something).

The big question: can Powerset save Microsoft’s Live Search?

Microsoft’s online strategy has failed to capture anyone’s imagination except for those people so computer illiterate they don’t know how to change the default search engine in Internet Explorer. This is not to say that parts of Microsoft’s online effort aren’t really cool, Popfly, and Windows Live Maps are leaders in their relative spaces, but search has been a failure for Microsoft, irrespective of how much money they throw at it. And it’s not that Live Search is really bad, it isn’t (it’s significantly better than Yahoo in my opinion), but it’s not Google either.

The important thing to consider with Powerset is that it delivers a distinct point of difference to Google. Live Search powered by Powerset becomes Ask Jeeves 2.0, and although Ask Jeeves itself may never have been wildly successful, it was due more for a failing of its algorithm at the time then the concept of natural language search not having a place. The flip side: Powerset is not proven on indexing anything more than Wikipedia, so we don’t know really how good the algorithm is. We can take that it does work to some extent by Microsoft acquiring it, but until we see it in the wild it’s hard to make the call.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Confirms Powerset Acquisition
2. Powerset Launches: Ask Jeeves 2.0
3. Microsoft Announces Facebook Search/Advertising Deal

Michael over at TechCrunch loves the service but rightly notes “There is no way to look at Powerset today and determine if it can be as disruptive to search as Google was when it launched almost a decade ago. That’s because it only queries Wikipedia.” Out of the box the natural language capabilities have a wow factor, but only in terms of an Ask Jeeves 2.0 with a limited search base. The unknown question is still how this would apply to the broader web, and without knowing that, providing any major kudos to the company is speculative at best.

The video above shows how it works, or you can visit Powerset here for a test drive.

Related posts:

1. Can Powerset Save Microsoft Search?
2. Microsoft Confirms Powerset Acquisition
3. Wikia Search finally canned