Marketing Pilgrim

It seems that Microsoft’s taking three steps forward and one step back, with its hiring of other companies’ employees. It just lost Hugh Williams to eBay.

He left Microsoft to become vice president of development for search for the auction site and, judging by Williams’ LinkedIn profile, eBay gains the guy that helped created Bing:

I was a Partner at Microsoft, and a development manager in the Bing team. I’m proud to say that many of the features of the first Bing release were created by my team.

And we don’t mean Hakia’s “social network.” Yet another semantic search startup is trying to leverage the power of social networking—but this time not as a social network where you can discuss your queries, but through friends recommending related sites.

Semanti is a new semantic search engine from someone who gets why previous efforts toward semantic search has failed. As Read Write Web puts it,

Perhaps the biggest problem with natural language search is that it’s incredibly difficult to try and automate machine-assigned ontologies. Essentially, machines just don’t get it.

Microsoft is sure making a lot of news in search these days. As reported here earlier the new look search of Kumo is lurking about although Microsoft is acting like Kumo is some kind of hallucination that deserves a homepage.

Now add to that the news reported in a Computerworld article regarding the U.S. market share of the major search engines. It appears that Microsoft’s share is at a 12 month low which is, well, not real good. Microsoft may be asking “Where’s that darn Kumo thing anyway? Maybe that really will help? It certainly can’t hurt at this point.”

I’ll admit, I expected it would take Microsoft a lot longer to start integrating Powerset’s search technology with Live Search–but the company is announcing the first of the new features.

Freebase Answers Integration

First-up, Live Search Answers will use Powerset to bring in results from Freebase Answers. Freebase looks to be a cross between Wikipedia and Google’s Knols.

Better Wikipedia Captions

I’d hardly call this exciting, but apparently some of the $200 million paid for Powerset will help Live Search better display Wikipedia results. [Yawn!]

Related Searches

Remember Cuil? No, not “quill,” “cool” as spelled by . . . I don’t know, monkeys. Perhaps I’m the only one having trouble remembering the latest, much-hyped not-quite-Google-killer because I was still in the hospital (here’s why) when it launched (although I did guest blog about Cuil at Bruce Clay, and I still managed to forget what Cuil was…).

Even if Cuil’s launch didn’t go over so well, they lost VP Louis Monier and they aren’t getting traffic, Cuil founders still have a reason to laugh all the way to the bank: a $200 million valuation according to PE Data Center.

I really don’t like west coast time. The east coast has a 3 hour jump on you and you always feel like you’re playing catch-up.

Fortunately, the news today is good, but not earth-shattering. Here are today’s Picks:

• If you’ve not turned on SSL in your Gmail account, you might want to do so, before these hackers have their wicked way.
• Google hopes to earn some good will from political bloggers by hosting a "Big Tent" blogger facility at the Democratic and Republican conventions.
• Microsoft is hoping that recently acquired Powerset will also help advertisers better place their ads.

Breaking news from Microsoft…

We’re excited to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

Just six weeks after its coming out parade, natural language search engine Powerset is the subject of two rumors about its acquisition by Microsoft.

VentureBeat kicks things off, by telling us the deal has been done, and the purchase price $100 million.

Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned.

The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month.

As if annoyed that VentureBeat might have gotten the scoop, TechCrunch reports the deal is not actually final.