It is not a rumor now as today Microsoft has announced that it has acquired Powerset which is an internet company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. Microsoft has future plans to integrate the company’s search and natural language features into Live Search. The San Francisco-based company’s employees will now become part of Microsoft’s Search Relevance team. PowerSet is trying to build a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web. The company has licensed natural language technology from PARC, the former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. On May 11, 2008, the company launched PowerSet.com, a search engine for searching contents on Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords.

According to the internet experts, Microsoft is very much impressed with their search techniques and profiles of the people working in PowerSet. Microsoft officials say, PowerSet shares a vision to take search to the next level by understanding the intent and meaning behind people’s search terms. So after acquiring PowerSet, Microsoft hopes to improve its understanding of users’ intent behind their searches and provide an improved user experience, instead of just running a straight query on the keywords used and forcing users to click through numerous results to find what they want. Let’s see how PowerSet’s new ideas and innovations help Microsoft to make a search engine better than Google.