So It’s a Fight to the Last Algorithm Then

 

Microsoft, which recently bought Fast Search, is buying the three-year-old semantic search engine start-up Powerset for $100 million, according to VentureBeat, which says it’s to “close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine.” Still, the natural language approach is a long shot. The only thing Powerset’s put out so far is a month-old service to search Wikipedia on an iPhone. Steve Ballmer’s been on an “improve search” kick.