Beyond Blue Links!

From the story, we learn things such as:

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

and:

The company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called “semantic search,” which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.

and:

Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

Be sure to read the full article. I don’t want to be doing too many extended quotes out of it. But having read it several times myself, I keep trying to understand what’s new here.

Google’s Existing Semantic Search & Direct Answers

Google’s arguably been doing semantic search since 2003, when it began searching for synonyms of the words actually entered. It has increased its understanding of the meaning of words over the years and even did a detailed blog post about this in 2010. Here’s another from 2009:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

As for “spitting out” those “facts and direct answers” that the WSJ story talks about, Google’s been doing that for so long that it’s hard for me to even know exactly when it all began.

Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack from 2009 covers how direct answers were provided in response to a variety of searches, and many of these answers were already integrated into Google for years before that was written.

UPS & FedEx tracking reports, along with flight status updates, a built-in calculator and more. Had it in 2004. Movie information and stock charts? 2005. Music and weather? 2006. Sports scores? 2009.

Here’s Google blogging about “Just the facts, fast” in 2005:

Have you ever needed a piece of info right now? Today we’re excited to introduce Google Q&A.

We’ve pulled together facts from all over the Web to help give you the fastest possible access to the quick bits of information you need every day; just type a query into the search box, and you’ll get back the answer at the top of your search results. Q&A knows about a lot of areas: celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics, movies, and anything else we’ve thought of so far (including enabling you to get answers on your mobile device).

Try it out, and keep checking back. This is only the beginning.

Google Squared Still Lives

How about extracting facts from pages, to figure out things like the inventor of the telephone or when a movie release will happen. Google touted doing all this using its Google Squared technology in 2010. See here on the Google blog and our own stories:

• Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements
• Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates

By the way, Google even was offering facts like the sexual orientation of celebrities, though this was dropped last year.

Honestly, it sounds like Google is just going to ramp up showing results that come from its Google Squared technology, as well as what’s been built since its Freebase / Metaweb acquistion. The WSJ mentions the latter, but not Google Squared:

But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google’s acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities….

Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing “extraction algorithms,” or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web.

It also approached organizations and government agencies to obtain access to databases, including the CIA World Factbook, which houses up-to-date encyclopedic information about countries worldwide.

Google Squared was closed as a stand-alone service last year, but the technology has remained a part of Google search. These articles explain more about it:

• Google Squared Is Now Live
• Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts

Why If There’s PR Smoke, There Might Be No Fire

If all this isn’t really new, why’s it getting played up so big with the Wall Street Journal, as well as Mashable last month? Mashable even quoted Google talking about its “knowledge graph” for the first time that I’ve seen.

My take is that Google’s pushing these technologies for some good PR, and they are in turn being blown up out of proportion to what will really happen.

Google’s been under intense pressure in some quarters since rolling out Search Plus Your World, pressure that its results aren’t as good as in the past. It’s helpful to counter that type of bad PR with interviews talking up forward-looking technologies. Heck, it’s right out of Bing’s playbook.

Remember Bing & Powerset?

If you believed all the forward-looking stuff that Bing has pushed, you’d have expected Google to have been a whimpering child of a search engine cowering in the corner, at this point.

Why remember Powerset, with all that amazing semantic technology that Bing later acquired? Here, read up on it:

• Powerset Launches “Understanding Engine” For Wikipedia Content
• Official: Microsoft Buys Powerset

Sure, Powerset is part of Bing. Did you notice it making Bing significantly better than Google? Has Bing drawn tons more people over to it from Google for having that technology?

Nope. But that doesn’t stop Bing from talking it up, though it seems to have done less of that lately. Powerset is good technology to have. It might lead to important future improvements. But no instant revolution is about to pour forth from it, nor has it.

Remember Bing & Wolfram Alpha?

Heck, remember when Wolfram Alpha partnered up with Bing? This was after Wolfram Alpha’s factually-based search engine failed to wipe Google off the map, as some assumed it would. Here are some reminders of that:

• How To Overhype Your Search Engine
• Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”
• Bing Launches Wolfram Alpha Collaboration & Several New Search Features

For all that the direct answers were supposed to be important, I can’t even get Bing to trigger some of the examples it touted when linking up with Wolfram Alpha.

Make no mistake. Wolfram Alpha is a cool, useful search engine. In fact, I had a long, excellent conversation with Stephen Wolfram on Monday while at the SXSW conference about how things are going and some interesting things to come. Stay tuned.

But it’s important to distinguish between what’s put out as PR versus what’s likely to happen in reality. Bing’s done a lot of big talk, and when that big talk has done nothing to stall Google’s market share, it still keeps talking big. This past piece from me explains more about that:

• Dear Bing & Yahoo: Pushing Deck Chairs Around Isn’t A Good Plan

Why’s Google Talking Big?

Google’s doing some big talk of its own now, which as I said, is probably being interpreted as even bigger than it really is. But why this specific talk about direct answers and understanding?

For one, Google shot itself in the foot last year. At the D Conference, WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg pointed out to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt that Google didn’t do as good as job as Bing in providing direct answers. And Schmidt agreed! From my coverage then:

Mossberg said that Bing seems to have more direct answers in some cases.

“There’s that in some narrow cases,” Schmidt said.

There you go — one of the top three execs at Google admitting that Bing beats Google, even if it’s in a narrow case. I’m sure there have been some statements like that before, but they’re few and far between.

It was crazy. Mossberg wasn’t right. What the hell is “some” cases supposed to mean. In “some” other cases, Google has more. But overall, no one has any idea who provides more direct answers, much less meaningful direct answers. No one. Mossberg didn’t inventory this himself. There’s no third-party survey out there. It’s not like there’s some “direct answers app store” listing answers that you can count.

That was just Mossberg, in my view, saying what he believed in his gut. It was Schmidt, to me, kind of cowering against Mossberg. He is, after all, Walt Mossberg. You don’t just tell him he’s wrong. Even if he is.

As a result, Google positioned itself as being weak to the leading tech journalist on the planet. How do you pull yourself out of that?

The Siri Problem

I know! Maybe you start talking about all those direct answers you’re going to do? Make sure you do that fairly quickly, because you’ve got another problem brewing.

While your latest Android 4 mobile operating system has arguably made it harder for people to search by voice — and while most Android phones still haven’t been upgraded to it — those iPhone 4S phones all equipped with Siri sold like hotcakes.

What’s Siri doing? Sending some of the searches people do not to you (as you’d think that deal you have with Apple would require) but instead over to Yelp and Wolfram Alpha.

You know, like 25 percent of the voice searches people are doing with Siri. That’s a lot of searches.

The press noticed that. They also noticed when Apple distanced itself from Google Maps in the latest version of iOS. You even had a financial analyst trying to figure if the end of a Google-Apple deal would harm Google’s bottom line. That got press attention, too.

If you’re Google looking at all this, it becomes even more important to start talking about how you have this Wolfram Alpha-like fact engine that you’re churning up. Heck, you even rolled out a Wolfram Alpha-like graphical math calculator last year.

What To Expect

To sum up, Google’s already said several times over the past year or so that it would be providing more and more direct answers. It sounds like that’s the biggest thing that’s likely to be released in the coming months.

Those direct answers potentially take traffic away from a relatively small set of sites that try to serve up direct answers, such as the height of Mount McKinley. That’s sad for those sites, but it’s good for the searcher. And it shouldn’t impact the much larger set of sites out there with broader information.

Indeed, you can already see this now:

You can see the direct answer at the top. The three arrows from that area show how some of the sources also get surfaced as regular results. Below that, the fourth arrow highlights how another site appears.

Having the direct answer might prevent some searchers from clicking through to any of these. But with the answer already in some of the page descriptions, they probably weren’t clicking much already.

There have also been reports that Google’s working on a better version of Google Voice Actions, a version that’s more assistant-like, in the way Siri is. It might even get called Majel. That sounds reasonable, especially given how long various Googlers have talked about wanting to have a Star Trek-like computer (as voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry).

But in the end, for all that the search engines have talked for years about going beyond “10 blue links,” I’d be surprised if the changes the WSJ story today talks about dramatically alter what we see now on Google. More answers, sure. But those 10 blue links will still likely remain the core of what’s shown.

For Google’s part, when I emailed for any comment, it replied with: ”We have nothing specific to announce at this time.”

I’ll be following up to see if I can pry anything more on-the-record about this.

Postscript: Google’s Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s search efforts and who was cited in the WSJ story, has posted to Google+ to say:

Some recent news coverage about Google has sparked interest in where we are and where we’re headed in search.

Let me just say that every day, we’re improving our ability to give you the best answers to your questions as quickly as possible. In doing so, we convert raw data into knowledge for millions of users around the world. But our ability to deliver this experience is a function of our understanding your question and also truly understanding all the data that’s out there. And right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited. Ask us for “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” and we’ll give you decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is.

In 2010, we acquired Freebase, an open-source knowledge graph, and in the time since we’ve grown it from 12 million interconnected entities and attributes to over 200 million. Our vision for this knowledge graph is as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge — an endless cycle of creativity and insight.

But as I explained in an interview last month [ED note: the Mashable interview I mentioned above], our initial steps towards this virtuous cycle are indeed baby steps. So stay tuned for updates on what will continue to be a long road ahead.

The last part is key in all this: “the long road ahead.” I think that underscores the point of what I’ve written, that you’re unlikely to see a massive change to how Google search looks and operates in the near term.

Related Articles

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• How Siri Patches Up The iPhone’s Voice Search Weakness Vs. Android
• Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions
• Why Siri + Yelp = Useless Google Maps On The iPhone 4S
• Not Just Google: Siri Searches Bing And Yahoo Too
• Google Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri?
• Google Faces “Innovator’s Dilemma” As It Prepares Response To Siri
• US Subpoenas Apple For Details About Default iOS Google Search Deal
• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building

As sites and pages multiplied exponentially Google became an increasingly necessary tool. We’re all familiar with the story. Now Google controls a majority of search traffic in most countries around the world. It has become a seemingly unstoppable force.

The influence of search (paid and organic) has been so powerful that billions of dollars have changed hands and established media companies have been all-but-toppled by their failures to recognize and exploit search effectively. Newspapers in particular fall into the latter category.

But the lessons of search and SEO have been well-learned by some media companies, many entrepreneurs and investors. In response, a range of so-called “content farms” has arisen to drive page views off “content” created by hundreds of mostly low-paid bloggers (and some former journalists).

Demand Media, Associated Content (now part of Yahoo), Examiner.com, Suite 101 and others recruit and train freelancers to quickly generate articles on all manner of niche topics that will drive qualified page views or lead generation in some cases. Yahoo just made a $100 million bet on this version of SEO. And AOL is pursuing a somewhat more refined version of this same strategy with Seed.

The original model arguably is “The Mining Company,” which in 1999 became About.com and was later acquired by the NY Times for its SEO/link value. While About.com was originally about “content curation” (organizing and commenting on links), the content farms are about content creation.

Despite the protests of the companies themselves about the terms “content farm” and “content mill,” the truth is that the articles and columns produced by these operations are of variable quality at best. And in some cases the content they generate should be considered a form of spam.

The proliferation of dubious or low-quality content from some of these sites is, over time, a direct threat to Google in my view. Google doesn’t present any publisher “branding” in search results so users must often click back and forth to find a quality source for the information they’re seeking. Google’s algorithm is supposed to address issues of quality and authority — and it often does — but the rising tide of mediocre, SEO-driven content creation is a fundamental problem for searchers.

Enter Blekko.

Over the past several years there have been many runs at Google and general search, including Powerset (acquired by Microsoft) and the ill-fated Cuil. None of these independent challengers has succeeded to date. (The jury’s still out on Bing of course, but arguably it has already succeeded by several measures.)

For those who haven’t heard of it, Blekko is a general search engine that will launch relatively soon. It has been written about several times by TechCrunch and I wrote about it briefly a year ago after an initial demo from founder Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson. Danny intends to do a “deep dive” on Blekko shortly so I’ll let him discuss features in depth.

There are two general characteristics that differentiate Blekko: transparency and user control. It’s also social in interesting ways; registered users can “follow” one another.

Blekko’s motto is “Slash the Web.” The centerpiece of that slogan and its chief innovation is the concept of “slashtags.”

Slashtags allow search personalization and filtering through the creation of mini-indexes of authoritative or favorite sites. For example, Skrenta has created a slashtag for wine blogs that he likes: “/skrenta/wineblogs.” In short this allows him or me to search an authoritative or personal sub-index of the internet for wine-related content and recommendations.

This way I can get articles and commentary from sites I trust or that people I trust recognize as authoritative — and cut out the, pardon the expression, crap content.

While there’s a short learning curve slashtags are easy to use and their value is almost self-evident. Blekko can also be used just like Google without slashtags as well.

Slashtags address the content-spam problem I described and provide control over results not offered by Google today. My prediction is that sophisticated search users will immediately be drawn to Blekko for the personalization, SEO tools (I’ll let Danny discuss) and social features it offers. I also predict that after it formally launches we may see some slashtag-like development from Google.

In 1998 the web was ripe for Google. But Google’s profound success and the way it has shaped the internet, giving birth to content farms, may have paved the way in 2010 for Blekko.

NOTE: Please see our detailed review that’s now available, Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You “Spin” The Web.

The first article is Everyone Loves Google, Until It’s Too Big and picks up on the monopoly discussion. I responded over the weekend on my personal blog Screenwerk. The second and subject of this post is Exploring a ‘Deep Web’ That Google Can’t Grasp.

From the “Deep Web” article:

Beyond those trillion pages [indexed by Google] lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available — if only the search engines knew how to find them.

Yes, an engine that can mine all that data and present “answers” to users would be quite exciting. However, as the article points out, Google is also investing in trying to mine more of that so-called “deep web” itself.

There have been many extravagant claims by and about semantic search engines (e.g., Powerset, bought by Microsoft) and deep web projects in the past (Chris Sherman has much more perspective on this than I). But so far, none of them have really borne fruit.

A quote from the “Everyone Loves Google” article is also relevant here and I believe correct about what changes might make a difference at least in the near term:

“Whether we’re slightly ahead or slightly behind Google in core relevance is not a game changer in search,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s chief search strategist.

Yahoo’s best opportunity, Mr. Raghavan said, is to offer radically new ways of presenting information that will help users finish whatever it is they started before the search, like finding a job or buying a plane ticket. “People don’t want to search; it’s a digression,” he said. “They want to complete a task.”

Search results pages right now are terribly cluttered (and flawed in my opinion). But doing something that truly delivers on the “complete a task” metaphor is challenging in myriad ways:

• Technology/algorithm
• Interface design
• Political: picking winners and losers from among similar sites to a much greater degree than today

Mobile is also an interesting lab for PC-based search. The limitations of the mobile “form factor” and the greater need/immediacy regarding the information will likely hold some eventual lessons for online search.

Microsoft and Yahoo (assuming it doesn’t sell search to Redmond) will continue to make improvements in their algorithms, indexes and interfaces. The more competition the better because search will only become more important as the “deep web” is unlocked.

By the time you read this, the Powerset site should have changed into a tool that allows you search against material within Wikipedia. Why bother using Powerset rather than using Wikipedia’s own search tool or even Google set to look only within Wikipedia pages? The Powerset pitch is that you’ll get better results because Powerset’s technology has read and understood what every word within Wikipedia actually means.

An Understanding Engine, Not Natural Language Search

To understand that more, I beg that you forget you ever heard "natural language" being associated with Powerset. That’s not really describing what they do in comparison to regular search engines.

To explain, you have to understand that Google and the other major search engines are largely stupid. They don’t really understand the content on the pages that they "read." If they see the word "walk" in a sentence, they don’t know if walk is being used as a verb or a noun. In very general terms, they don’t even know that words are words. Words are more or less patterns to them — collections of letters — and when someone searches, they try to find the pages that have those patterns in them or in links to those pages.

That’s VERY simplified, OK? The major search engines DO have some smarts, some ability to know that walk is related to walking or that walk and run might be similar words. But this is largely done through statistical guessing, rather than comprehending what the individual words actually mean, especially in terms of their exact grammatical usage.

Powerset is different. It says that its technology reads and comprehends each word on a page. It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about.

In lieu of a better phrase, call it an "understanding engine." Maybe that’s not the right phrase, but natural language search isn’t it, either. Understanding engines at least highlights the uniqueness of Powerset — that’s because it actually understands what pages are about — it can extract facts from those pages plus comprehend how those facts, as well as those pages, relate to each other.

Wikipedia Discovery Tool

One of the chief uses for Powerset is employing it as a Wikipedia discovery or query refinement tool. To use the Powerset example they gave me during a briefing last week, consider a search for [henry viii]. What’s someone interested in in when they search on that topic, given Henry did a lot of things during his reign?

Over at Google, we get query refinement suggestions at the bottom of the page, like this:

At Yahoo

At Microsoft

Most of these are generated by looking at the relationships between those who have searched for one topic and then may have gone off and done another search. Yahoo has the most sophisticated of the pack (see Search Suggestions On Steroids: Yahoo Search Assist), but it still hasn’t actually "read" about Henry VIII and tried to group him into subtopics, in the way a human might.

That’s what Powerset tries. Here’s what you get in a search for Henry VIII:

Notice the tabs at the top, where it recognizes Henry VIII could refer to the person, the opera, the play, or even a television drama. OK, so not too amazing when you think about it. But look further to the "Factz" area. Here you can see that Powerset, after reading through Wikipedia, has figured out that Henry VIII "dissolved" things like monasteries or that he "granted" things like land. And yes, he "married" a few people.

There’s even more facts that can be found like this:

This is nice refinement. Running down the list, you can quickly scan the many facts that define Henry’s life. And from the list, with a click, you can drill in more about topics and jump right to particular pages within Wikipedia:

See how there’s a link to the Falmouth, Cornwall page? Powerset has seen that there’s something Henry VIII built mentioned on that page, Pendennis Castle. That’s not covered on the main Henry VIII page, but because Powerset has read both pages and understands what they are about, it can link the facts together.

Overkill For Now?

In short, the refinement is cool. What’s not to love about it? For one, it might be overkill. During the demo, Powerset made a big deal on how Powerset could build information from across various Wikipedia pages that isn’t written on any single one of them. For example, a search for [hulk hogan] brought this up:

See how those who Hulk Hogan has defeated are itemized? It’s nice — but do you really trust that all the defeats have been captured? I wouldn’t. I’d probably still go looking for an authoritative list that had been reviewed by a human. Moreover, I can get lists like that without great refinement. A search for hulk hogan victories on Google brings me to this nice page on About.com listing his world title victories.

In addition, while Powerset did a nice job of breaking down Henry VIII according to Wikipedia, Wikipedia’s human editors do a pretty nice job right in the opening paragraphs to the Henry VIII page:

Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was King of England and Lord of Ireland, later King of Ireland and claimant to the Kingdom of France, from 21 April 1509 until his death. Henry was the second monarch of the House of Tudor, succeeding his father, Henry VII.

Henry VIII was a significant figure in the history of the English monarchy. Although in the first parts of his reign he energetically suppressed the Reformation of the Anglican Church, which had been building steam since John Wycliffe of the fourteenth century, he is more often known for his ecclesiastical struggles with Rome. These struggles ultimately led to him separating the Anglican Church from Roman authority, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and establishing the English monarch as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Although some claim he became a Protestant on his death-bed, he advocated Catholic ceremony and doctrine throughout his life; royal backing of the English Reformation was left to his heirs, Edward VI and Elizabeth I. Henry also oversaw the legal union of England and Wales (see Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542). He is noted in popular culture for being married six times.

I suspect most people hitting Wikipedia are already going to find an opening paragraph like that, which does a pretty good job guiding them in refining their topics about Henry VIII and pointing them to facts.

That’s a problem for Powerset, which told me it hopes to  attract lots of those Wikipedia users to its own site, where they’ll be eventually shown ads alongside the content (ads aren’t present at launch).

Powerset was at pains to explain how popular Wikipedia is and what a well used resource it has become. Agreed — and plenty of those people wind up there because they’ve done searches at Google. About 70 percent of Wikipedia users come via search engines, according to Powerset itself. That’s a huge audience that is NOT going to magically be routed to Powerset instead. Yes, some know to go directly to Wikipedia. No doubt some of these users will hear of the new Powerset tool and go there. However, it will be a stunning achievement if these are more than a fraction of those who hit the main Wikipedia site.

Article Outlines

Powerset has another trick up its sleeve that might pull in the people. For any page you visit, there’s an "Article Outline" box that appears within it, like this:

It’s very slick. Select an item, and you’re jumped to the spot within the document related to it:

I think it’s self-evident that Powerset adds some nice value to Wikipedia. Indeed, everyone would probably be smart to go to it directly rather than Wikipedia itself. But as I’ve covered above, that’s not what I expect to happen.

Future In Site Search?

If Powerset fails to capture a wide audience, then what’s the way forward for it? One area is to provide better site-specific searching. Powerset’s technology can be applied to any set of documents, to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for within them. Site specific search allows those visiting a particular web site to look just within that site. That market, along with enterprise search (making intranets searchable) continues to grow. And the audience doing those types of search are likely more inclined to seek out refinement options and other exploratory tools than they are when performing general searches.

Powerset said this is a market they’re interested in, so perhaps we’ll see it grow in that area. But for those expecting it to produce Google-wealth, keep in mind that long-time and mature enterprise search player FAST sold for $1.2 billion earlier this year. Yes, that’s a huge amount of money, but it’s not the multibillions Yahoo was going to go for, and it’s much less than what Google’s valued at.

Speaking of Yahoo, it used to be the leading candidate in the past of who might acquire Powerset, especially given some close ties between the companies (Powerset has a number of former Yahoos on staff). Given Yahoo’s current troubles and unstable state, I wouldn’t expect much here.

Could a tie-up with a major player like Google or Microsoft happen? Sure. Aside from site search, the technology that allows machines to automatically comprehend what text documents are about ought to have other applications and be worth something. What those are and how much it is worth isn’t clear. Powerset’s been smart to snap up many licenses and patents around the technology that should make it attractive to a larger search player like Google or Microsoft to acquire. Within one of these organizations, I suspect more innovative things would come.

FYI, I wrote the above paragraph last Friday, before the rumors (see here on News.com and here on Techmeme) that Microsoft might want to buy it came out over the weekend. Actually, I started writing this article several months ago and in that, was covering how it might be an acquisition target. It’s a fairly obvious move to expect any of the majors to take a look, and when I talked to Powerset several months ago, I was given the impression that all the majors had taken a look.

Since then, of course, no one has acquired it — plus the company went through a management shake-up last year. It was already under fire for not getting a product out for so long. Add to these strikes as a potential Google killer the fact that it takes Powerset about a month to comprehend Wikipedia’s 2.5 million topic pages. In that time, many of those pages will have changed — thus needing to be reread again. Powerset’s impressive, but with the web having in excess of 20 BILLION constantly change pages, this is no overnight secret weapon that Microsoft might buy and employ to take the search lead.

Indeed, what Powerset says it has developed — along with patents locked up to protect it — is overkill for what’s needed today. It will be more useful probably five years from now, in ways we’re not even envisioning. For those players thinking long-term, which include both Google and Microsoft, sure — it might well make sense to buy.

By the way, the Powerset launch will no doubt inspire interest in another "natural language" search engine, Hakia. Someday I want to revisit Hakia and explain more about why I also dislike the term "natural language" being applied to it. In the meantime, you can read Vanessa Fox’s excellent article from last October on the service, Social Networking Through Search: Hakia Helps You Meet Others. And if you need a deflation of natural language hype, see The Google Challengers: 2008 Edition. In the section on Powerset, I summarize a long rant I did on the history and hype of natural language search.

For related discussion, see Techmeme.