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Archive for July, 2008

Hello Powerset

According to the awesome guys of the Live Search team, we recently bought Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company. The exciting part of this rather administrative announcement is that Powerset adds natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

As they say on the Powerset blog: At Powerset, we transformed our idea into a world-class semantic search platform, demonstrating the future of search with our Wikipedia search experience. But building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine. Because our goals around improving search align so well, Powerset has decided to team up with Microsoft. We believe that this is the fastest way to bring our technology to market at a large scale.

Microsoft shares our goal to improve search through deeper analysis of queries and documents, and understands that our technology and expertise will play a key role in the evolution of search. With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale.

That famous Wikipedia demo they talk about has been reviewed and tested by Ars Technica and they were pretty impressed with it. Powerset’s potential and passion are more than welcome, and I’m looking forward to seeing their technology melt together with ours to make the entire search experience better. Here’s a demo from their features:

Powerset Demo Video

LineRider

One of the funniest time-wasters I’ve seen in the latest year is the quite popular LineRider app. A very simple thing, but still oh so fun to try out. It’s been turned into a real art form by some, who’ve taken the design of their own game to the extreme (as shown in the clip below):

And to top it off, LineRider even got it’s own moment of glory as it was fully integrated in a MacDonalds commercial:

A few days ago, an email got sent around in the company that said the LineRider.com website was now running on Silverlight technology, which is an even better reason to try it out and promote it. And so, here we are :)

LineRider