Microsoft has signed an agreement to purchase Powerset, a semantic web search company.

Powerset, in its own words, is "a small company with big dreams". It licensed technology from PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, and has been working on software that can search by indexing pages based on the meanings expressed in them, as opposed to the words contained in their pages.

PowerSet announced the deal last night on product manager Mark Johnson's blog.
"Microsoft shares our goal to improve search through deeper analysis of queries and documents, and understands that our technology and expertise will play a key role in the evolution of search. With an existing search infrastructure, incredible capital resources, unlimited data, a leading search team, and clear mission to revolutionize the search landscape, Microsoft can rapidly accelerate our progress in building semantic search technology and bringing it to full Web scale" he said.

While the related post on Microsoft's Live Search blog talks of a shared vision which, "is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages."

Together the firms will attempt to tackle unsatisfactory search results, adding a semantic layer that can group words by context and association and provide much more tailored results. "We will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better" the blog post concludes.