Powerset's search raises $12.5 million

will incorporate a deeper linguistic component than existing search engines so that a user’s intent correlates more accurately with search results. Powerset sees itself competing directly with Google and other popular search engines.

The companmy currently has twenty-three employees and the current round of funding will allow it to expand. Powerset has struck a deal with Amazon.com to rent space on the latter’s servers, a deal which would allow Powerset to spend more money on staff hiring.

-read more in this news release; and see Paul Bonanos’s The Deal report

BLUE BOX

With $12.5 million in venture financing — all this without hardly explaining how the search software works — Powerset’s success is a clear sign that the industry is on the upswing. The market for natural language search, especially those products that can overcome the linguistic deficiences of current products, is estimated to reach $1.84 billion by 2008 — in large part because the technology crosses so many other related industries. Powerset has said that it wishes to compete with Google and other Internet search engines, but we suspect the company has broader goals than that. Health care, insurance, and especially government intelligence are all sectors just begging for better search products.

Take, for example, Palo Alto, California-based Attensity. As we have previously reported, the company has made a name for itself with its ability to manage unstructured text such as e-mails, letters, and reports that are not created using a template and are therefore unsortable beyond a simple word search function. The company relies on computational linguistics — using computers to create statistical and logical models of natural language — to draw out critical data points from unstructured text and place it in a relational format. An insurance company, for instance, might be interested in tracking fire-related claims in order to isolate areas of high risk. Attensity’s software not only would use advanced search technology to find all claim letters that mentioned the word ‘fire’ and all of its synonyms and related terminology, it would use linguistic assessment tools to give adjusters better information about who or what was causing the fires and whether there were any patterns in how they were being reported.

Powerset’s forthcoming offering sounds quite similar. “While most search engines would fail to distinguish between ‘books by children’ and ‘books about children,’ even dropping the prepositions and producing confusing results, Powerset’s product would hone in on Web pages and documents sought by the user more successfully than its competitors,” TheDeal.com reported. Not enough detail was available at press time to make a sound comparison, but we intend to follow up and share more detail with our readers as events warrant.

-Attensity Web site