Microsoft Corporation acquired Powerset, a transaction announced in July 2008.
Powerset operates in Live Search (later Bing), is based in San Francisco, California, United States. Powerset was a San Francisco natural-language and semantic-search company whose technology aimed to understand the intent and meaning behind search queries and web pages rather than matching keywords alone. Microsoft acquired it—principally for its engineers and computational linguists—to add semantic understanding to Live Search (later Bing).
Take search to the next level by adding natural-language understanding of query and page meaning; acquire top NLP/computational-linguistics talent.
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.Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal and Advertising, Microsoft
Advisory firms were not disclosed for this transaction.