News
Microsoft acquires search start-up
Categories: Search Engines
02 July 2008
Microsoft has announced the acquisition of semantic search start-up Powerset.
The company's senior vice-president of search, portal and advertising, Satya Nadella, confirmed in a Live Search blog post that it had agreed to buy the San Francisco firm.
While he did not disclose financial terms, blog VentureBeat said last week that the deal is rumoured to worth just over $100 million (£50.2 million).
Powerset was founded in 2005 and has developed search technology that is able to look at the meaning behind web pages and specific terms, potentially allowing for more accurate search results.
Its first product, a search tool for use with Wikipedia, was launched two months ago.
"Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research," Mr Nadella commented.
Microsoft has spent about $8 billion on internet-based acquisitions in the last two years, according to the New York Times.
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