Steve Ballmer's Google envy knows no bounds. Just a month after Microsoft announced a cheesy cash-back search service, the company is rumored to be eying a $100 million acquisition of much-hyped Powerset, a natural language-based search engine, that is only usable on Wikipedia and Freebase. (Powerset declined to comment.)
Lots of search researchers are skeptical of Powerset -- the engine indexes Wikipedia content just fine, but those pages are pretty uniform. What happens when Powerset is let loose on the whole crazy and chaotic world wide web? Some critics tell us that Powerset won't scale. We're not in a position to speculate, but we'll all have a better idea soon -- the company says it "will expand our product offerings with additional premium content and exciting new features."
While we admire Microsoft's chutzpah, we're a little confused. The company has thrown hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of dollars at its existing search engine, Live. And based on our experience, Live rocks. Microsoft's search problem isn't technological as much as it is a branding issue -- there's just no incentive for users to leave a service they like.
But if Microsoft wants to throw another $100 million to solve a problem they don't have, nobody's going to stop them -- certainly not the investors in Powerset, anyway.
