At least in part. As Mark Johnson, senior program manager at Microsoft, notes on the Powerset blog, the first projects in collaboration between acquirer and acquired “are currently being ‘flighted’ on Live Search, which means that they are being shown only to a small percentage of users.” Resulting data from the experiments will “decide what features will eventually roll into the product.”
The efforts being made by Powerset and Microsoft are 1) to expand on the Live Search results with Freebase Answers, 2) parse semantic queries for Wikipedia results, 3) involve Powerset’s Factz “to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries.” Some of these may not catch the immediate interest of Web users everywhere. As Johnson writes, the alterations are “transparent.” But the visual cues Powerset provides offer a window into what one might expect to see in coming months as a result of the collaboration, and what they amount to is smarter. Perhaps more natural and intuitive, too. The following screenshots are good indication of where things are headed:
