Interview With Barney Pell and Ramez Naam About Microsoft?s Powerset Acquisition: Integration By End Of Year

I spoke with Powerset cofounder/CEO Barney Pell and Microsoft's Live Search General Program Manager Ramez Naam shortly after Microsoft's announcement of their acquisition of Powerset earlier today.

Microsoft intends to use Powerset's natural language search technology as a major differentiating factor v. no. 1 search player Google (see our recent coverage of Live Search Cashback, a another Microsoft search effort aimed at getting more market share).

TechCrunchIT goes into detail on how effective Powerset may be as a weapon. But a few things are clear - the resource limitations (cash and computing resources) that slowed Powerset's development are now history. The relevance problem is less important since Microsoft core search relevance is quite good. And users really seem to like the beta launch of Powerset even with the limited dataset.

Naam says 5% of searches contain elements of natural language that keyword based search algorithms don't handle well, and there's an assumption that as better results are returned, more people may start to simply type a normal sentence instead of a couple of keywords. Microsoft will integrate at least parts of Powerset technology into Microsoft Live Search by the end of the year, Naam says. I expect we'll be hearing a lot more about natural language search coming out of Microsoft shortly.

The full interview transcript is below, and you can listen to the MP3 over at TalkCrunch.

Michael Arrington: Hello this is Mike Arrington with Techcrunch. I have on the line today Barney Pell the co-founder and CEO of Powerset which was acquired, or actually announced that it was going to be acquired by Microsoft, earlier today the ancones was made. And from Microsoft I have Ramez Naam on the phone as well. He?s the group program manager for Microsoft Live search. Welcome Guys.

Ramez Naam: Thank you.

Barney Pell: Thank you.

MA: So just to be clear, what exactly was announced today? You announced that you?ve signed a deal, but not closed it yet.

RN: That?s right, we?ve signed the deal but the transaction has not happened but we?ve agreed on all terms for Powerset to become a part of the Live search team at Microsoft.