In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google

In brand-new offices with a still-empty game room and enough space to triple their staff of nearly 30, a trio of entrepreneurs is leading an Internet start-up with an improbable mission: to out- Google Google.

….. Powerset recently received $12.5 million in financing. Hakia, which like Powerset is trying to create a “natural language” search engine, got $16 million. Another $16 million went to Snap, which has focused on presenting search results in a more compelling way and is experimenting with a new advertising model. And ChaCha, which uses paid researchers that act as virtual reference librarians to provide answers to users’ queries, got $6.1 million.

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