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.
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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 — 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
