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Microsoft Virtual Earth evangelist Chris Pendleton reveals that "Ask.com has migrated off of their mapping platform and onto Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform." No terms were announced, but Ask.com joins "YellowPages.com, Superpages.com, and WhitePages.com to name a few" who are using Virtual Earth.
As had been rumored last week, Microsoft has acquired Powerset, a semantic search and natural language processing startup based in San Francisco for an undisclosed sum said by sources to be in the neighborhood of US$100 million. Microsoft SVP Satya Nadella explains the rationale:
Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.
More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).
We’re buying Powerset first and foremost because we’re impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.
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.
There’s more on the technology there and on Powerset’s web site (including this demo video), but the big picture is to offer a better search to users than Google’s in order to whittle away at their share. I would have to observe that Powerset certainly isn’t the first or only company to try to apply semantic concepts or natural language processing to Web search - just Ask Jeeves.
As Brad Stone observes at the NY Times, “There’s nothing like a little regulatory scrutiny to get Internet companies talking about privacy.” With the EU, the US Federal Trade Commission, and the US Congress getting into the act there’s plenty of scrutiny and Microsoft today followed Google with an announcement to deflect it.
In what is becoming the Web search world’s equivalent of TV ratings, comScore yesterday released their March US search rankings:
Yes, we are talking small numbers and the other search rankings services have their own slightly different ratings (e.g. Hitwise which had both Microsoft and Yahoo down for the month), but it didn’t look good on a day when Wall Street was already less than pleased with Yahoo performance.
One final caveat: search is really a world market and it’s also worthwhile to consider how things are going in non-US venues. To that end, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise UK blogged their UK statistics for the four weeks up to April 15 and Google has nearly an 80% share and is running away with the game while Microsoft is in fourth place behind Yahoo and Ask.com and falling. Two countries don’t make a worldview, but one wonders whether there is some place where Microsoft is doing well.
Nielsen/Netratings yesterday released their USA search stats for November and the net for year over year number of searches (in provider rank order) is:
It’s one thing to lose share, but MSN/Windows Live Search actually lost traffic while the overall search volume grew and that is the the same story as in October and recent prior months as well. It’s not a pretty picture considering how much effort Microsoft has put into Windows Live Search.
On a related note, Topix.net’s Rich Skrenta sparked a lot of discussion with his observation that based on referrals to prominent websites, Google’s ability to drive traffic is considerably greater than even its first place search share ranking would indicate. Microsoft’s Don Dodge summarizes the discussion nicely.
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