Powerset Teams Up With Live Search

Powerset, the semantic search engine that Microsoft purchased in July, has been collaborating with Microsoft’s Live Search team on several projects designed to be released within 30 days. Microsoft is currently testing them on a small, randomly selected audience.

The projects include:

Freebase answers. Freebase bills itself as “an open database of the world’s information.” It’s a Wikipedia-like project that’s open to anyone who wants to contribute information. Microsoft is tapping in to Freebase to provide expanded Live Search Answers. “Today, many topical queries such as such as musicians, albums, and films don’t show Answers. So for this experiment, we selected some of these categories and used Freebase to return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers in Powerset,” wrote Dr. Scott Prevost on the Live Search blog.

Improved captions for Wikipedia results. One of Powerset’s cool features is that its semantic technology generates improved captions for Wikipedia articles. Those captions will now be pulled into Wikipedia results in Live Search SERPs:

New related searches using the Factz engine. Powerset “Factz” are concise representations of information extracted from sentences, with three parts: the subject, relation and object. Live Search is using Powerset’s Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries:

Microsoft says that it will continue to work with Powerset to improve Live Search, and vice versa. To read more about how Powerset is starting to use Live Search technology, see the Powerset blog.

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Chris Sherman

Chris Sherman (@CJSherman) is a Founding editor of Search Engine Land. He also programs and chairs the Marketing Land Search Marketing Expo - SMX conferences.