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<title>Search_Engines RSS : Gourt</title>
<link>http://computers.gourt.com/Internet/Searching/Search-Engines.html</link>
<description></description>
<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
<dc:rights>Copyright 2007, Gourt.com</dc:rights>
<dc:date>2008-10-13T07:39+16:00
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<dc:publisher>rtruog@gourt.com</dc:publisher>
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  <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/18/live-search-from-safeco-field.aspx" />
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<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/10/08/live-search-powerset-team-at-web-3-0.aspx">
<title>Live Search Powerset team at Web 3.0</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/10/08/live-search-powerset-team-at-web-3-0.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[The Live Search Powerset team will be presenting next week at Web 3.0 in Santa Clara on October 16-17. Scott Prevost, Powerset general manager, is providing Friday's keynote on The Road to Semantic Search. And I'm hosting a roundtable discussion on Thursday with Alitora, Cerebra, Metaweb, and Thompson Reuters called Semantic Startup 101 - Successes, challenges, and strategic decisions.
For details, see Powerset at Web 3.0 next week. 
Hope to see you in Santa Clara!
Mark Johnson, Senior Program Manager, Live Search Powerset team]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/10/07/facebook-friends-live-search.aspx">
<title>Facebook &#x22;friends&#x22; Live Search</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/10/07/facebook-friends-live-search.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Today we're excited for our friends at Facebook. Now Facebook users in the U.S. have the option to "Search Facebook" or "Search the Web." In addition, adCenter is delivering search ads alongside those results. For me that means getting great search results while receiving highly relevant ads that are personalized by either my Facebook profile or search query. Find out more about the Facebook team's first implementation of Live Search in their blog.

This is a great first step in our partnership. As we evaluate user feedback and results we'll explore additional ways to integrate Live Search more deeply into the Facebook experience.
We'll have more to share on this partnership in the weeks to come, so stay tuned. In the meantime, tell us what you think on our Facebook page.
Angus Norton, Senior Director, Live Search Product Management]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/10/06/east-coasting-at-smx.aspx">
<title>East Coasting at SMX</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/10/06/east-coasting-at-smx.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Live Search is headed to New York City for SMX East 2008! SMX — Search Marketing Expo — is one of the premier “all-search” conferences. The goal is to educate and empower marketers, publishers, and advertisers alike to get the most out of search.&nbsp;So if you’re headed to the show, October 6-8, come find us at one of the many panels we’ll be speaking at. Or stop by booth #640, where staff from Live Search and Microsoft Advertising will be on hand to answer questions and talk about our latest offerings, like SearchPerks. &nbsp;
Panel Sessions:
Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager for Live Search Webmaster Center&nbsp;will be presenting at the following sessions:

What is Spam? 10:45am-Noon, Tuesday, October 7th
Unraveling URLs &amp; Demystifying Domains 1:30pm-2:45pm, Tuesday, October 7th
CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 &amp; SEO 3:15pm-4:30pm, Tuesday, October 7th 
Ask the Search Engines 2:30pm-3:30pm, Wednesday, October 8th 
In the Theater:

What’s Live got to do with it? SEO and Webmaster tools Presentation Overview Speaker: Ani Babaian, Senior Product Manager, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft 6:00-7:00pm, Monday, October 6th
From Microsoft Advertising:

Search &amp; Display AdsPavan Lee, Research Manager, Microsoft,&nbsp; 1:45pm-3:15pm, Monday, October 6th&nbsp;

Ask The Paid Search RepsBrian Boland, Director, adCenter, Microsoft2:30pm-3:30pm, Wednesday, October 8th

Find out more about Microsoft's presence at SMX in the Webmaster blog and the adCenter blog.
&nbsp;
Aya Zook, Product Manager, Live Search]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/10/01/earning-your-loyalty-one-search-at-a-time.aspx">
<title>Earning your loyalty...one search at a time</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/10/01/earning-your-loyalty-one-search-at-a-time.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[From cashback to Live Search club we've been building programs to help increase engagement, usage, and loyalty. Today we're expanding our efforts with the release of SearchPerks!, a new program designed to reward consumers with cool prizes&nbsp;— like frequent flyer miles, Xbox games, and music downloads&nbsp;— just for using Live Search.
To participate, visit http://www.getsearchperks.com/ and download the Perk Counter, a small download that appears as a toolbar in Internet Explorer. The Perk Counter keeps count of your searches using Live Search and awards "tickets" that you can redeem for prizes at the end of the promotion. We award 500 bonus tickets just for downloading and installing the Perk Counter. You'll also earn an additional ticket for each of your queries on Live Search (up to 25 tickets per day).

You can accumulate tickets from the start of SearchPerks!&nbsp;today until the promotion ends on April 15, 2009. Registration will be open through the end of the calendar year.

Get started collecting SearchPerks! tickets for your searches on Live Search today!
Keith Jeffery, Senior Product Manager, Live Search]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/25/helping-you-find-your-way.aspx">
<title>Helping you find your way</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/25/helping-you-find-your-way.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[The Virtual Earth team has just released a major update that brings some great new features, as well as enhancements to existing features to Live Search Maps. Some of the highlights include: 

New imagery. Brings locations to life, with richer bird's eye and 3D imagery of more locations in cities across North America. 




Weather Integration. Features near-real time&nbsp;local weather and cloud formations within the 3D imagery.

Localized maps. Provides maps in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish for customers in Western Europe. Localized maps are supported for both desktop and mobile applications.
Near-matching capabilities. Uses near-matching capabilities to find locations with alternate and similar spellings, resulting in a more relevant search experience. 
Landmark-based routing. Enhances searching for customers in the U.S. and Canada by offering maps with familiar landmarks, such as gas stations and fast-food restaurants, called out by name. 
Rich imagery for mobile users. Shows new maps rendered specifically for mobile devices.



One-click directions. Gives directions in one click, enabling you to choose from route options by shortest time, shortest distance, or traffic flow. 
All of these improvements are made possible by the new Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2. If you are an application developer or a webmaster, you can take advantage of these new Virtual Earth offerings as well. For more details, see Announcing the Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2.
Enjoy!
Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Technical Evangelist]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/18/live-search-from-safeco-field.aspx">
<title>&#x201C;Live&#x201D; (Search) from Safeco Field</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/18/live-search-from-safeco-field.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[If you were trying to get a hold of someone in Live Search today, you were probably getting nothing but voicemail as it seemed like everyone was keen to get downtown for the Microsoft company meeting! When I left campus this morning there were 10 buses full&nbsp;of Search team members&nbsp;leaving for&nbsp;Safeco field. After chatting briefly&nbsp;with Harry Shum and a few developers who were waiting for their bus, I headed out on my motorbike to get ready for my demo. 
I’ve been here at the company for 17 years and I love the company meeting. When I worked in Dublin and London we used to watch the meeting on video link (a bit warmer), and when I moved to Seattle in 2003 I finally got to experience&nbsp;being there in person. It’s always been a great place to hear what’s happening across the company and check out all the cool demos.&nbsp;I had the opportunity to demo again this year, and although I can’t tell you all the cool things I got to show, I can say that it’s always fun demoing in front of a huge, enthusiastic stadium crowd.&nbsp;Backstage was amazing, watching the executives rehearsing and working together to make the event great for employees. Speaking for myself, I left with no doubt that our leaders love this company and the products we make and sell. Their passion was motivational for me. 
One of the key themes for&nbsp;Live Search&nbsp;each year at the company meeting is to demonstrate how much feedback matters to us. We take all input seriously, as it is a great way for us to improve. Over the years, employee and customer feedback has helped us build out great vertical scenarios that simplify key tasks like shopping and travel. This feedback has also helped improve our core relevance to ensure we’re always focused on delivering the best results. This year's meeting was no exception, as we’re asking everyone to continue the tradition and to keep sending their feedback.
So even though you weren’t invited to our company meeting, we are extending you an invitation to give us your feedback about Live Search&nbsp;at live.com.
Derrick Connell, Group Program Manager]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/17/powerset-s-first-live-search-projects.aspx">
<title>Powerset&#x2019;s First Live Search projects</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/17/powerset-s-first-live-search-projects.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Powerset officially became a part of Microsoft a little over a month ago, and Live Search has been hard at work collaborating with Powerset on several quick projects designed to be ready for testing within 30 days. These projects encouraged early collaboration between our two teams, as well as sharing of respective technologies.
Freebase Answers
Our first joint project was to expand the coverage of Live Search Answers. Today, many topical queries such as such as musicians, albums, and films don't show Answers. So for this experiment, we selected some of these categories and used Freebase to return a topic summary with links, similar to the Freebase Answers in Powerset:
Improved captions for Wikipedia results 
Our second project was to use Powerset's semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles. Because Wikipedia articles show up in a large percentage of Live Search queries, it's important that the captions are top notch.
&nbsp;
Old caption

New caption
New related searches using the Factz engine
For our third project, we used Powerset's Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries:

For more details about these projects, including how Powerset is starting to incorporate Live Search technology into their site, see the Powerset blog.
All of these projects are currently being tested on a small, randomly selected audience, so watch out&nbsp;— you may see one! And stay tuned for more announcements from Powerset and Live Search.
Dr. Scott Prevost, General Manager, Powerset, and Dr. Hugh Williams, Primary Development Manager, Live Search
&nbsp;]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/08/microsoft-translator-makes-the-web-more-worldly.aspx">
<title>Microsoft Translator makes the Web more worldly</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/08/microsoft-translator-makes-the-web-more-worldly.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Now that the Web is more worldwide than ever, the number of non-native English speakers going online has ballooned, and yet online content in English still dominates. For these users, free translation services mean that an entire world of information can now actually be at their fingertips. We're doing something to help them out.
Translation now fully powered by the Microsoft Translator technology is available through Live Search, as well as IE8, the Windows Live Toolbar, and even a translation bot for Windows Live Messenger.
For example, to translate this search result, click "Translate this page" at the end of the result description:

You'll see the page in a bilingual view, with the original page on the left, and the translated page on the right.
Here's how the Messenger bot does translations for you. Just add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts and start chatting away. You can have one-on-one conversations with the bot, or you can invite a friend and chat in different languages with the bot translating for you.

Here are the languages we support today:

English to/from:

Arabic
Chinese Simplified
Chinese Traditional
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Portuguese
Russian (Russian to English only)
Spanish
Chinese Simplified to/from Chinese Traditional
We'll roll out more languages over the next several months.
To learn from Microsoft Research about how it works, check out Machine Translation. To keep up with new features, check out the Microsoft Translator team blog. And finally, to try out the service, go to Translator.
Or just click the Translate this page in your search results. However you use it, after you try it out let us know what you think!
Lane Rau, Marketing Manager, Microsoft Research Machine Translation team]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/03/let-your-voice-be-heard.aspx">
<title>Let your voice be heard</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/09/03/let-your-voice-be-heard.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Elections document the will of the people, or at least the will of registered voters. On November 4th, you'll be asked to answer many questions, including who should be our next president, as well as questions at your state and local level.
Many blogs and analytical sites offer projections, comparisons to previous elections, and details about the issues and candidates themselves, including the MSN Election Guide. Those are great and important resources for informing your opinion.
But it's about the people's voice, right? And now you can search for what they're saying! 

Live Search QnA represents the community's microphone and speaker, since the community asks and answers each other's questions. Links are encouraged to help prove or disprove a claim, and you can search through all the pre-existing question/answer threads over a range of topics. Michelle Slatalla, the New York Times journalist, reports on the rising phenomenon with her own recent experience in searching for (and finding) an answer to why her smoke alarms kept on beeping (answer: spider interference!).
And with the Democratic Convention finished and the Republican Convention underway, some of the most active political questions involve whether Senator Clinton's speech was sincere and supportive of Senator Obama, what people think of Senator McCain's Vice-Presidential pick, and whether the economy or national defense will be the driving factor. Whether you agree or disagree, join the community and express your opinion.
Let the community hear who you think is going to win and why!
Liam Ross, Senior Product Manager, Live Search]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/08/29/something-s-different-at-live-search.aspx">
<title>Something&#x27;s different at Live Search!</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/08/29/something-s-different-at-live-search.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Whew, what a busy&nbsp;couple of weeks it's been. We launched our new home page back at the end of July with the goal of using a new picture each week. Then we decided to get a little crazy for the Olympics and rotate the images twice a day. About three days into the Olympics, we realized we just could not go back to one picture a week!
So a few days ago we shifted gears again. We're now giving you&nbsp;a new image&nbsp;every day, with hotspots to help spur your imagination.&nbsp;Sometimes we'll just show great pictures that we like; sometimes the images will be related to topical events, like the upcoming Labor Day holiday or NFL season kickoff.
We'll occasionally have images from the elections, but rest assured we'll be giving both parties equal time.
And if you don't like the picture you see today, don't worry – there will be a new one tomorrow!
– the Live Search Homepage team]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/08/15/get-ready-for-ses-2008.aspx">
<title>Get ready for SES 2008</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/08/15/get-ready-for-ses-2008.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[A quick note about my upcoming keynote at the Search Engine Strategies conference, Tuesday, August 19th at 9:00 am in San Jose. Kevin Ryan and the entire SES organization put on one of the best search conferences around. This year I have the privilege to present to more than 4,000 of you down in the Valley. Our large presence around the show will let us hear from all of you about our products and services and help us better understand the perspective that you bring to the show.
During my keynote on day two, I'll share with you our perspectives on how the search landscape has changed and how it will continue to evolve, based on key trends and our ability as an industry to react to them. I'll take you back in time a bit to talk about our early days of search marketing and look forward&nbsp;to the industry’s recent moves into semantic search. It’s an exciting time for us all as we begin to usher in a new phase of search that looks at how we can deliver a more intuitive user experience and a better ROI for advertisers. With these changes, I'll talk about how Microsoft is addressing and embracing this evolution. Specifically, I'll highlight some of the new product features, including Live Search cashback, which we unveiled at Advance08. I’ll also focus on how we think about building more open and sophisticated tools for advertisers and publishers, and show a few demos like our recently released Webmaster tools.
All of this, coupled with a Q&amp;A session with Kevin Ryan, should make for a great opportunity to talk about how search is evolving and where Microsoft is headed.
I look forward to meeting many of you at another great SES San Jose conference. And please stop by our booth #309.
Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising
Where&nbsp;you can&nbsp;find us
Monday, August 18

9:45am-11:00am: Universal &amp; Blended Search Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager, Live Search 
11:15am-12:30pm: Semantic Search: How Will It Change Our Lives? Scott Prevost, General Manager and Director of Product, Powerset 
2:45pm-4:00pm: Everything but Google: Alternative Search Advertising Options Mary Berk, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
Tuesday, August 19

9:00am-10:00am: Morning Keynote Satya Nadella, SVP, Search, Portal &amp; Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft
4:00pm-5:15pm: Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers Brian Cosgrove, Site-Side Analytics Engineer, AvenueA / Razorfish 

We're also hosting a sponsored session, Diagnose SEO Issues Using Live Search Webmaster Tools, on Tuesday from 2:45pm-3:45pm. Speakers are:


Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft 
Andy Woods, Development Lead, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft 
Ani Babaian, Senior Product Manager, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft 
Wednesday, August 20

10:30am-11:45am: Building a Search Friendly Site William Flaiz, VP, Search Engine Optimization &amp; Web Analytics, AvenueA / Razorfish 
1:00pm-2:15pm: Searcher Behavior Research Update Pavan Lee, Research Manager, Microsoft
1:00pm-2:15pm: Auditing Paid Listings &amp; Click Fraud Matthew Gretzer, VP &amp; Global Discipline Lead of Search Marketing, AvenueA / Razorfish 
2:45pm-4:00pm: Keywords &amp; Content: Search Marketing Foundations Jorie Waterman, Lead Program Manager, adCenter Keyword Research Platform
Thursday, August 21

10:15am-11:15am: Effective Contextual Search Management Dennis Buchheim, Sr. Director - Product Management, APS Networks, Microsoft 
1:30pm-2:30pm: Organic Listings Forum Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Center, Live Search 
2:45pm-3:45pm: Site Clinic Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager, Webmaster Center, Live Search 
2:45pm-3:45pm: In House SEO: Lessons learned &amp; Victories Won Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect, Microsoft 
Find out more about Microsoft's presence at SES in the Webmaster blog and the adCenter blog.
]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/08/07/we-re-bringing-the-olympics-to-you.aspx">
<title>We&#x27;re bringing the Olympics to you</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/08/07/we-re-bringing-the-olympics-to-you.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Microsoft is into the Olympics in a big way through our partnership with NBC on NBCOlympics.com, the official online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing! And Live Search is ready to help you find everything you want during the games. 
&nbsp;
Feeling competitive? We’ve made it easy for you to find out if your country is ahead or behind – just search for “Olympic medals” and you'll get up-to-the-minute tallies by country: 
&nbsp;
Check it often to watch those medals add up!
&nbsp;

If you just want to see a specific country or sport, you can do that, too. Try “Medals for Portugal” or &nbsp;“Medals for Swimming” and you'll get the latest counts as they happen:

It isn’t always about who is winning, although those heart-wrenching stories of hardship leading up to victory make some Olympians more popular than others. If you don’t want to be left out of the conversation over lunch, check out Olympic xRank. Not only will you know who is hotter than the torch but why. 
&nbsp;
On the other hand, if you hear an athlete’s name or want to find out why you keep seeing their face on your co-workers' monitors, try our Athlete Answer. Enter “Michael Phelps” and we give you everything you need in a neat little package: 
&nbsp;
Speaking of news, we’ve pulled it all together for you with our new Olympic News scope. We look for stories – articles and videos – across all the sources we can find and constantly provide the freshest, most relevant stories for you. If you just want to get right to the videos of the events and athletes try video search.
&nbsp;
And we're not done! In our last blog post, we introduced you to our new homepage. It's gotten great reception and we wanted to do something special during the Olympics, so we'll be updating the image twice a day with great shots from the Games. Watch for it when the Olympics begin on 8/8/08. 
&nbsp;
We hope your team brings home the gold from Beijing!
&nbsp;
Jacquelyn Krones - Senior Product Planner for Live Search
]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/08/06/improve-your-site-s-standing-with-new-webmaster-tools.aspx">
<title>Improve your site&#x27;s standing with new Webmaster tools</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/08/06/improve-your-site-s-standing-with-new-webmaster-tools.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Today we are bringing our Webmaster Tools out of beta and releasing several new features that help webmasters see how Live Search crawls and indexes your sites. As a website owner, you can use these tools to improve your results on Live Search when a someone is looking for your site. The new Webmaster tools give you more data about referring links, identify issues Live Search encountered when crawling your site, and help you improve the overall indexing of your site. For the full story about this release, see the Webmaster Center Blog.
You can check out the new tools at http://webmaster.live.com/. And for questions, be sure to visit the Live Search Webmaster forums.
Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Center]]></description>
</item>

<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/07/30/new-home-page-aims-to-help-you-explore-more-on-the-web.aspx">
<title>New home page helps you explore more on the Web</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/07/30/new-home-page-aims-to-help-you-explore-more-on-the-web.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[Today we're releasing an update to the Live Search home page that received positive feedback from customers in trials last month. The new design features background images that will change frequently, augmented with what we call "hotspots." These interactive areas highlight parts of the image and help you explore search results related to the highlighted area. Users who have tested this new home page have found it both engaging and a great place to start a search. 
New images and hotspots
In our release last spring we laid the foundation for this page. In this home page release we've added background home page images that we'll change regularly and hotspots that click through to great search results. Hotspots gleam to the user when the page first loads then fade into the image. Users can discover them again by moving their mouse over them, revealing details about the image and a link to a related search result. To ensure that users can start a search immediately, our base page loads first with the images and hotspots loading quickly afterward. Users on a broadband connection may not notice the two steps. Today we're releasing the new home page in the U.S. only, with more markets to follow in the future.

A great place to start a search
Our goal for the home page is to find the best way to enhance users' sense of discovery, surprise, and delight while balancing engineering realities for a great user experience.
Extensive user research and exploration of many concepts with our customers pointed us in the direction for this design. We want the page to be a great place to start a search and also to intrigue and inform as well. We think hotspots will help users discover parts of Live Search they might not know while not distracting from the core purpose of the page&nbsp;— searching.
We think the new design is a great start, but there's more to come, with lots of interesting directions that we'll be exploring in our next releases of the home page.
Chris Rayner, Senior Product Manager, and Zach Gutt, Senior Program Manager Live Search User Experience team]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/07/01/powerset-joins-live-search.aspx">
<title>Powerset joins Live Search</title>
<link>http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/07/01/powerset-joins-live-search.aspx</link>
<description><![CDATA[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).
We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset&nbsp;— Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan&nbsp;— we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.
That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.
We know today that roughly a third of searches don't get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this:

Differences in phrasing or context between a user's search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages. Search engines don't understand today that "shrub" and "tree" are similar concepts. We don't understand that "cancer" sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which.
Lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results. Sometimes a result looks relevant from its short description on the results page but turns out to be not so relevant when you visit the actual page. As a result, searchers frequently click results and then rapidly click back when they realize they aren't what they're looking for.
These problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a webpage. We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage. Doing so, we can innovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience. We will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better.
Working with our existing Search team and other Microsoft teams that focus on natural language, Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities.
We're looking to add even more talented engineers to the San Francisco team to accelerate our shared progress. If you're interested in joining the team, drop us a line.
We'll have more to say about the things we're doing in understanding searches and webpages through natural language technology in the coming months. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Powerset to Microsoft!
Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising
See also: Microsoft to acquire Powerset]]></description>
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