What Do You Mean?

Microsoft has recently purchased Powerset, a small company that deals in semantic search engine technology and released a proof of concept through Wikipedia. The principle is inline with other Microsoft Live Search goals, which is moving searching beyond matching mere keywords and phrases but actually understanding the meaning and the context of the search terms.

The possibility is that people will be able to ask a question and get a list of results based upon what the question relates to even if the best match doesn’t contain the keywords. This would probably never happen but it gives you an idea as to what can be accomplished. It means people get results more in common with what they are actually looking for and not just a bunch of web pages that happen to have the same keyword. This could revolutionise the internet but I fear that Microsoft’s proprietary attitude will undoubtedly lead it to be less than it could be.

The reason Google is so successful is that it is simple and quick. More recently Microsoft has attempted to emulate this with its Live Search which I must admit is quite good, but is no where near as good as Google’s. One good thing about the semantic search might be the removal of search results that are just putting your search query into another search engine… VERY ANNOYING.

Will this sematic searching bring them to the next level? Possibly, but I am left wondering what the next level for the Google search will be. It seems as case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it’.