science

Powerset (company)

Powerset (company) is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Powerset (company) rather than just read about it. In short: Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million (~$143 million in 2024).

Key takeaways

Powerset (company) belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Powerset (company) to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Powerset (company) from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million (~$143 million in 2024). Powerset was working on building a natural language search engine that could find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword based search). For example, when confronted with a question like "Which U.S. state has the highest income tax?", conventional search engines ignore the question phrasing and instead do a search on the keywords "state", "highest", "income", and "tax". Powerset on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and return pages containing the answer. The company was 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 English Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords.

Powerlabs In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007. Business Week said: "The company hopes the site will marshal thousands of people to help build and improve its search engine before it goes public next year." Said The New York Times: "[Powerset Labs] goes far beyond the 'alpha' or 'beta' testing involved in most software projects, when users put a new product through rigorous testing to find its flaws. Powerset doesn’t have a product yet, but rather a collection of promising natural language technologies, which are the fruit of years of research at Xerox PARC." Powerlabs' initial search results are taken from Wikipedia.

Notable people Barney Pell (born March 18, 1968, in Hollywood, California) was co-founder and CEO of Powerset. Pell received his Bachelor of Science degree in symbolic systems from Stanford University in 1989, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was a National Merit Scholar. Pell received a PhD in computer science from Cambridge University in 1993, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has worked at NASA, as chief strategist and vice president of business development at StockMaster.com (acquired by Red Herring in March, 2000) and at Whizbang! Labs. Prior to joining Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Pell is also a founder of Moon Express, Inc., a U.S. company awarded a $10M commercial lunar contract by NASA and a competitor in the Google Lunar X PRIZE. Steve Newcomb was the COO and co-founder of Powerset. Prior to joining Powerset, he was a co-founder of Loudfire, General Manager at Promptu, and was on the board of directors at Jaxtr. He left Powerset in October 2007 to form Virgance, a social startup incubator. Lorenzo Thione (born in Como, Italy) was the product architect and co-founder of Powerset. Prior to joining Powerset, he worked at FXPAL in natural language processing and related research fields. Thione earned his master's degree in software engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Ronald Kaplan, former manager of research in Natural Language Theory and Technology at PARC, served as the company's CTO and CSO. Ryan Ferrier is a member of the founding team of Powerset. He managed personnel and internal operations. After 2008 he went on to co-found Serious Business, which made Facebook applications and was later bought by Zynga. Another Powerset alumnus, Alex Le, became CTO of Serious Business and went on to become an executive producer at Zynga when it bought the company. Siqi Chen founded a stealth startup in mobile computing after leaving Powerset. Tom Preston-Werner worked at Powerset and left after the acquisition to found GitHub.

Investors Powerset attracted a wide range of investors, many of whom had considerable experience in the venture capital field. The company received $12.5 million (~$18.2 million in 2024) in Series A funding during November 2007, co-led by the venture capital firms Foundation Capital and The Founders Fund. Among the better-known investors:

Esther Dyson, founding chairman of ICANN, founder of the newsletter Release 1.0 and editor at Cnet Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of PayPal Luke Nosek, founder of PayPal Todd Parker. Managing Partner, Hidden River Ventures Reid Hoffman, executive vice president of PayPal and founder of LinkedIn First Round Capital, seed-stage venture firm

See also Bing (search engine) Apache HBase

References

External links Powerset main web site - redirects to Bing Powerset acquired by Microsoft

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Powerset (company)

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Powerset (company) claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Powerset (company) before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Powerset (company) ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Powerset (company)

In research: Powerset (company) appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Powerset (company) in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Powerset (company) is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2008 mergers and acquisitions, Companies based in San Francisco, Defunct internet search engines, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Powerset (company) outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Powerset (company) in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Powerset (company) means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Powerset (company) out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Powerset (company) in simple terms?

Why does Powerset (company) matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Powerset (company)?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Powerset (company).