is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.

Powerset is working on building a natural language search engine that can find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword based search). For example, when confronted with a question of the form ‘which U.S. state has the highest income tax?’, conventional search engines ignore the question and instead do a search on the keywords ‘state, income and tax’. Powerset’s product, on the other hand, attempts to use to understand the nature of the question and then to search and return a subset of the web that contains the answer to the question. If it works, results from Powerset’s search engine would have a higher relevance than results from a keyword search engine. From a commercial standpoint, advertising on the results page could also be more relevant and could have a higher revenue potential than that of keyword search engines.

Currently, the company is in the process of “building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web.” The company has licensed natural language technology from PARC, the former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords.

On July 1, 2008, Microsoft signed an agreement to acquire Powerset

[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company) ]

[Website http://www.powerset.com/]