Powerset and Semantic Search

Yesterday Powerset announced that they are going to be acquired by microsoft. Rumor said the deal is roughly $100 millions.

Apparently, Microsoft is hoping to compete with the search giant google, with powerset's "natural language search" technology, or the so called semantic search. I personally think this is not a bad approach for Microsoft. Recently there are some discussion over the current semantic search products. Semantic search is argued to be an alternative solution for the day to day search.

The problem with the current search engines(google for example) is that, it always gives you the most popular results, implying that the information carried by those are true and thus are what you need. This is true for many cases, but not all of them. Semantic search tries to give you a full coverage of the searched term. So to me, semantic search is good when you want to research on something, rather than find the answer, or more simply, the link.