Business & Technology News: Xerox and startup deal to rival Google

Xerox-PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) struck a licensing deal with Powerset to develop a search engine based on Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Search engines from Google, Yahoo, etc. depend on keywords entered by the user without necessarily “knowing” what the words mean or how they relate to each other. NLP technology in search engines can accept input entered in the way people write or speak (What company did IBM acquire in 1996?).

Powerset concedes that NLP technology is “an incredibly hard problem”, even after more than three decades of research. Still, the company remains optimistic citing recent “breakthroughs at PARC in this area,” with the software licensed by Powerset having some of the highest-quality NLP-based search available.

Read the full article here.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/09/HNxeroxpowerset_1.html

*This just made me think about how competitive the environment must be in the research centers of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. to improve their current search algorithms or design a new one. One of them (Google) aims to increase its lead against competitors. The others want to inch closer to the top spot.