Microsoft bought Powerset (company) on July 1, 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company) On May 11,

Microsoft bought Powerset (company) on July 1, 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company) On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords. The natural language processing part of Bing (Powerset) is based on Wikipedia data (scrapping the content), but they had a prototype based on Freebase too: On April 16, 2008: "Powerset demonstrated our integration to Freebase. At one point, a group stood in front of the projected computer and threw out queries to see all of the different Freebase types that Powerset could handle." (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20080430113649/http://blog.powerset.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080430113649/http://blog.power... )