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Microsoft Buys Natural Language Arsenal for Live Search

To gun down Google and Yahoo

By Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor

2nd of July 2008, 07:48 GMT

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Microsoft has acquired a natural language processing arsenal for Live Search to gun down its main rivals on the search engine and online advertising market, Google and Yahoo. The Redmond company aims no less than to introduce a new standard

of relevance quality for mainstream search, one which is synonymous with the search engine actually understanding user queries. For Microsoft, taking search to the next level means adding relevance to the results returned to queries, and in this context, the company is betting big on semantics and natural language, and has announced the acquisition of search company Powerset.

Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal and Advertising, talked about a shared vision between Live Search and Powerset. "That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages. We know today that roughly a third of searches don't get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this: differences in phrasing or context between a user's search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages; and lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results," Nadella stated.

Powerset's Mark Johnson applauded the new partnership with Microsoft which will see the San Francisco-based startup join forces with the software giant's core Search Relevance team. For the time being, Powerset is extremely limited in its reach of the web, but with Microsoft's resources behind it, the startup will take Live Search beyond just the literal meaning of words entered as searches, down to the actual meaning. This is why Powerset is the product of not only search technology but also computational linguistics.

With the Microsoft core Search Relevance team swallowing Powerset's technologies, Live Search will evolve to become a large scale semantic search engine, made possible only through the Redmond giant's immense infrastructure and resources. However, Microsoft will not base Live Search's next generation semantics and natural language capabilities exclusively on what Powerset brings, but will deliver its own natural language processing technologies developed by Microsoft Research to the equation.

Nadella expressed his belief that natural language search is capable of solving the relevance issues associated with the existing model of searching. "We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage. Doing so, we can innovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience. We will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better," Nadella added.

TAGS:

Live Search | Powerset | natural language | semantics

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