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Powerset Blog - Home


Powerset's First Live Search ProjectsSeptember 17 2008

Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago and we’ve already completed our first few integration projects: Freebase Answers, improved captions for Wikipedia results, and new related searches using our Factz engine . 

These projects were meant to be achievable in 30 days and act as a first collaboration between the Live Search and Powerset teams.  We have plans for deeper integration in the future, but these projects gave us an opportunity to get to know our colleagues up in Redmond and drive greater understanding of our respective technologies.  All of these projects are currently being “flighted” on Live Search, which means that they are being shown only to a small percentage of users (if you get one, consider yourself lucky!).  Once we’ve gotten data back from the tests, we’ll plan next steps and decide what features will eventually roll into the product.

The first project was to expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows Answers.  Queries like San Francisco weather, MSFT, and Banff national park already produce answers.  Also, many celebrities from



Survey: College students love Wikipedia (profs not so happy)September 3 2008

Powerset has always suspected that college students love Powerset because it’s such a great way to search and browse Wikipedia content.  However, the only evidence we had was from Powerset parents and glowing feedback e-mails from .edu domains. 

Last week, we conducted a study of 200 college students through Peanut Labs, which confirmed our suspicion: college students are huge fans of Wikipedia.  Here are some of the highlights of the study.

  • Though 90% of students have used Wikipedia to complete an assignment, a surprising 73% of students have been explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia.
  • Also, about a quarter of students always use Wikipedia when they’re completing an assignment.
  • Not surprisingly, the most common use for Wikipedia is initial research.  However, about half of the respondents said that they use Wikipedia as a link to secondary sources of information.  That suggests that the reference section at the bottom of a Wikipedia article is an extremely valuable starting point for many topics.  Also, a third of students say that they’ve used Wikipedia as a primary research source.
  • Students find Wikipedia very valuable.  28% of students thought that Wikipedia was a very valuable resource, 49% thought that Wikipedia was relatively important, and 23% thou
Powerset Officially Part of MicrosoftAugust 4 2008

On Friday, August 1st at 5:15 p.m., Powerset officially became part of the Microsoft family.  Though the deal was announced on July 1, 2008, there were a few more i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed.  That’s all finished and the deal is done.  Our employees are excited to be a part of Microsoft and the Live Search team.

Integration is underway in force.  This Thursday and Friday, there will be a bunch of folks down from Redmond for a Symposium to share details about our respective technologies.  We’re excited to learn about everything now available to Powerset in the Live Search stack.  We’re also excited to share the cool things we’ve cooked up here at Powerset and start planning opportunities for us to integrate with Live Search.  Check back over the next month to see what we’re up to both on this blog and the Live Search team blog.

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Microsoft to Acquire PowersetJuly 1 2008

We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset.

Powerset has always been a small company with big dreams, with the ultimate goal of changing the way humans interact with computers through language. We initially set out to improve search by indexing Web pages based on the meaning expressed in them rather than just the literal words. Powerset licensed breakthrough technology from PARC, hired world-renowned computational linguists and search engineers, and recently released a search and discovery experience for Wikipedia articles. Our technology helps to improve search results and also makes new features possible, such as Factz, which aggregates information from many articles to summarize a topic.

With any startup, the challenge is to take the seeds of an idea and grow it into a viable company. At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-u



Powerset's Factz Contest Round UpJune 20 2008

A big thanks to everyone who participated in our Factz contest to win a Powerset t-shirt! It was a lot of fun to see people’s motivation and creativity in finding Factz. Here are some of our favorite blog posts.

Megha Agrawal wrote an excellent post about researching “at the speed of light.” He concluded his blog post by saying, “So if you’re having a class assignment due by tomorrow and you don’t have time to thoroughly read and understand the topic you can make use of the Powerset Factz that are fun to discover about a particular subject.”

Christian Straub found answers to questions such as Who killed jfk? This query is a great example of how Factz can directly answer a question, as well as provide further reading on a topic. Christian jokingly lamented that, “Powerset has actually managed to get me to waste more time (or educate myself more?) on Wikipedia. Instead of clicking at random links in random articles (which is still awesome by the way), you can type a subject or a question or a relation, and Powerset will often find some interesting factoids relating them.”