[Aleran]

The difference between Hotmail and Powerset is Microsoft has said that they will have some sort of integration with Live search by the end of the year.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/02/interview-with-barney-p...

Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about but having half of Live search running off Windows search and the remaining part being handled by Powerset's unix boxes sounds silly. Or at least I will think I am seeing pigs fly if it every happens.

[jm4]

I did see that Microsoft had said they will have some sort of integration by the end of the year, but that doesn't necessarily imply that they will need to port the Unix stuff to Windows. Maybe a mix of Live Search on Windows and Powerset on Unix sounds silly to some, but you could also make the argument that dumping a bunch of time and money into porting a working application after a $100M acquisition is silly.

The article you linked to mentions that only 5% of searches contain natural language elements. This integration they talk about could be as simple as identifying these searches and passing them off to the Powerset stuff in the background.

I don't doubt that Microsoft will eventually want to port everything to Windows, but I think it's a false assumption that this is going to be a top priority. They've made repeated statements about their desire to see this put to use quickly and speculation about a lengthy and complicated port seems to directly contradict that.