If Pell has a way with the ladies, then Thione (left), a devotee of gay beaches, has a way with the guys, according to this photo sent in by a tipster. In the background: Celebrity Cruises' Solstice ship, recently booked for a gay cruise in the Caribbean. To Thione's right: friends Kevin Lucas and Jonathan Deason. Way to go, Lorenzo! Judging by his buff physique, we'd say post-acquisition life has been good to him indeed.

We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.

Calling someone a "visionary" and "evangelist" is code for "lacking any real skills." Note how Pell gets credit only for introducing the real brains of Powerset's operations, not for "smarts" or "experience." While Microsoft's purchase of Powerset had me doubting their acumen, this deftly coded Pell-dissing blog post makes me think someone up in Redmond has a few neurons firing in the right sequence.

It's not clear how interested Yahoo really is. And it's unlikely Powerset will command a high price, if it sells. The company's core technology, XLE, is licensed from Xerox PARC, and for the rest, it mostly uses open source. But for Yahoo, whose in-house efforts to improve its search haven't made a difference in the marketplace, Powerset may hold enough interesting technology to be worth a look. Or perhaps Yahoo, bleeding engineers, is eager to hire en masse through an acquisition. Alas for Powerset's employees: They'd just be trading a small soap opera for a larger one.

Here's the unfiltered dirt:

It was inevitable that these two ridiculously arrogant, titanic egos would self-destruct. The org chart at Powerset was a dead giveaway: Pell and Newcomb set themselves up as lords of this feudal society with C-level titles and then built a company without VPs in the name of a flat, post-modern organizational style. The truth is they didn't want the peons anywhere near the decision-making or basking in the glamorous, self-aggrandizing PR campaign they launched way too early.

(Photo by AP/Ben Margot)

Our tipster writes:

I heard this really strange thing from a Powerset employee regarding their "other" CEO who must have been fired recently, and that it was for inappropriate behavior between the two executives, and their inability to not get along, because one of them had slept with the other's wife? Can we get any validation on that?

The bowl was slightly chaotic, the audio was lousy, and I'm not sure the buzzer system was working properly. The questions were kind of all over the place. One asked about when Pets.com ceased operations (November 6, 2000). Another asked about the technology which runs the iTunes music store (CDDB or Gracenote, which is really just the music-identification system for ripping CDs; Apple's WebObjects software really runs it). One controversial question: How much did Facebook turn down from Yahoo? John Battelle had the answer as $1 billion. Yahoo executive Garlinghouse debated the veracity of that figure. "You weren't in the room!" bellowed Ron Conway, when Battelle relied on his answer.

The most entertaining piece was how enthusiastically Ron Conway would shout "Bullshit!" if he thought a question or answer was incorrect and how insistent he was that the organizers should provide "Chardonnay next year!" He wasn't alone in that regards. After the show, Jay Adelson made the observation that the participants were far too sober.

About fifteen minutes into the bowl, in walked Google cofounder Sergey Brin, along with Google exec Megan Smith and other guests he had been seen with at dinner earlier that evening. Brin declined to say which team he was cheering for.

While I was standing next to Brin, Powerset CEO Barney Pell came up and reintroduced himself to the Googlionaire — they apparently met a while back. When Pell started to tell Brin how his hyped semantic search startup is now in a beta testing phase, I decided to cause a stir, asking Pell "Didn't the New York Times call you guys a 'Google killer'?" Pell's eyes went wide, and he said something about how reporters will write anything. But all of a sudden, Brin seemed more interested in Pell's spiel. (For the record, I was wrong. Last winter's article on Powerset didn't use that phrase, though other publications have.)

The first dude who did this was Sand Hill fratboy Tim Draper, who penned the lyrics to "Riskmaster," and its Cyrillic sequel "Another Riskmaster." Then, at the Stirr holiday mixer last year, a group of VCs going by the name The Uprounds debuted the atrocious "Jingle Bells, YouTube Sells". At search startup Powerset's party celebrating their series A funding, Foundation Capital partner Charles Moldow crafted a self-serving "Ode to Powerset."

The latest entrant is Bessemer Ventures partner David Cowan, who last night recited a limerick celebrating the closing of Bessemer-backed enterprise email startup Postini to Google. Here's Cowan's poem:

There once was a founder named Scott Who invented a messaging bot That filtered out spam — be it virus or scam — Now we never get spam (not a lot).

John, who led us with class,
Thought a quick IPO would be crass.
But Cowan kept cryin'
To Quentin and Ryan
Which gave John a pain in the ass.

For spam and archive retrieval
Google came, and caused upheaval!
Are we now Googlini,
Postoogle, Gostini?
All they told us is just: Don't Be Evil.

(Image by toothpastefordinner.com)

So, how was the crowd? Michael Arrington was there, of course, holding court and greeting well-wishers. TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde overviewed the event. Lots of TechCrunch40 presenters and DemoPit participants showed up, including Powerset CEO Barney Pell, who declined to take credit for his company's vodka giveaway, though he was a fan of the fun schwag.

I asked Pell about his company's participation in TechCrunch40. Powerset has gotten a fair bit of press in the past year. Wasn't the whole purpose of the conference to show off undiscovered companies? Pell told me that the conference organizers had actually come to him and asked Powerset to present. Interesting.

I, unfortunately, missed MC Hammer, though fellow TechCrunch40 "panel of experts" member Sarah Lacy (pictured above, with Arrington) was there. No Jason Calacanis, though. When asked about his partner's whereabouts, Arrington guessed Calacanis skipped the event. Running a conference does tend to tucker people out. So much for his treadmill workouts.

As the night went on, the over business agendas came out. One startup founder talked to me about his desire to sell for "at least $20 million" and started strategizing about potential buyers to target. Another presenting company was a bit more level-headed about the event. When asked about his reaction to being selected as one of the 40 lucky ones, he demurred. "It's not going to make us or break us, but it's nice," he said. Nice. Oooh. That hurts. Somehow I doubt, of all the words Calacanis and Arrington might be hoping to have carved on their tombstones, "nice" was on the list.

–Video by Sarah Meyers

Allison stood out at the schmoozefest for a host of reasons. First of all, a Diane von Furstenberg dress among the blue shirts and khakis? And while Allison has her own blog and website, her career pursuits are not tech-oriented in the slightest — in addition to her gig at Star, she writes a dating column for Time Out New York. She wouldn't know the CEO of a semantic search engine if he patted her on the ass, which, judging from the the picture above, almost happened. (That's Barney Pell of Powerset playing pattycake, by the way.)

In this this video interview of Julia and her friend Meghan Asha, they claim they only attended the event to meet tech boyfriends. Oh, and they want to meet tech guys who can help them program a website, and I'm pretty sure that "help them" means "do it for them."

I'm sure there's more to it than that. Of course Allison's gathering string for a column about hunting for a geek boyfriend. And if she is any indication, people outside of our little sphere are starting to pay attention, again, to the exuberance bubbling underneath Silicon Valley. The women who are about to invade the Valley are not the same gold-diggers as before, only out for that stock-option action. This time, they want the stock-option action and free sysadmin time.

For this, too, we have Arrington to blame.

(Photo by jspepper)

ChaCha: Needs lessons
Twist: "A smart search engine that 'learns.'" Harnesses power of humans (somehow), which is odd, because I thought we invented computers to do just this sort of thing.
Hubris: "A smart search engine that 'learns;'" refers to "first generation search engines." You know, like crusty old Google.
Results for "house": Decent results including the TV show, the legislative body, and real estate. (So does Google.)
Status: At least it's live, and the site's pretty.
Chance of success: 200/1. Not revolutionary, not scalable, and rough Alexa stats show it's not catching on. Hell, even Valleywag's in better shape.

Search Wikia (née Wikiasari): Today Britannica, tomorrow the world
Twist: Open-source search engine by Wikia, the company of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, contrasts with the "black boxes" of Google and Yahoo.
Hubris: CEO says Wikia wants 5% of the search market. Wales: "The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now." Also: "Search...is broken."
Results for "house": Well we have to build a search first, no?
Status: Much-hyped, but the actual site is just a placeholder-style wiki page.
Chance of success: Five percent share? 30/1, if Wikia actually sticks with the project. Look at this this way: director Quentin Tarantino talks about a million projects before he finally makes one. Of course that one kicks ass, but don't get fooled into thinking the others will ever see daylight.

Tall Street: Will break when popular
Twist: Users can rate search results on a 1-5 scale. Through a stock market, they can also bet play-money that a site will get clicked when it's in certain search results.
Hubris: The intro page says Tall Street wants to "help out the little guy;" philosophical statements; needs a dedicated community.
Results for "house":
Status: Still the little guy. Hadn't heard about it until the founder e-mailed us. If it gets popular, won't armies of users from massive sites easily game it?
Chance of success: 5000/1. Maybe it'll show up in a sidebar in Wired: "Eight search engines that could be the next Google."

Powerset: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
Twist: Natural language search: Like what Ask tried to do, but with a computer parsing the questions instead of humans hard-coding answers.
Hubris: Creators brag that everyone loves the demo. Raised $12.5 million last year.
Results for "house": Powerset isn't live. But if it were, it'd probably want a question like "When is House on?" or "How much is a house in Tampa?" Then, we're told, it'd give an answer, not a list of sites with the phrase "When is House on" in them. (Yep, that's all Google gives.)
Status: In demo. Testers say it's great? Then put it in beta.
Chance of success: 5/1. So much could go wrong, but Powerset is the one engine with a good shot at making search feel good. The two tricks: getting the system to work without constant embarrassing mistakes, and getting people to ask questions like humans again. (The latter assumes we know what we want to find.)

Snap: Honey I blew up the widget
Twist: Visual search shows previews of sites. Of course, this slows down the search site, which also features an annoying drop-down that guesses your search term as you type (oh boy, I saved 0.6 seconds typing and wasted 2 seconds using the drop-down). Snap also makes uses these link previews for the annoying bubbles that pop up when you hover over links on some widget-happy blog. Did you really care what the site looks like when shrunk to 300x500 pixels?
Hubris: Slogan is "The other way to search;" About page calls Snap "the next great search engine;" led by big-swinger, big-misser Bill Gross and his incubator Idealab.
Results for "house": Result #4 is "sponsored." Read: spam. Overintegrating paid results is a throwback to the terrible pre-Google days; site previews are often outdated or missing, and the whole page runs slow as hell. Plus it's apparently running Ask's search.
Status: Fully deployed in its bloated (but slickly wrapped) glory.
Chance of success: 100/1. Snap has enough business momentum to wallow around until someone buys it to harvest the pieces. The preview feature could be useful, but it sure ain't a Google killer. (Disclosure: Snap recently sponsored a party for which I helped build the guest list. Sorry dudes, prose before hoes.)

Eurekster: Others searched for "WTF?"
Twist: Community-powered search. Hold on to your butts, this is gonna get bumpy: Eurekster powers "swickis" that live on different sites. You can find a swicki by visiting a site that has one, or by searching Eurekster's list. Then search for a term within that swicki. Or pick a term from the "buzzcloud," which shows what others have searched — not that you need a suggested term if you're already looking for a particular term.
Hubris: Eurekster's front page has four award badges, seven press quotes, and no search box.
Results for "house": First result in the swicki list is a substance abuse search engine by Aloha House. Okay, let's go there and search "pills." Decent results! Of course, there are all these mysterious buttons, bubbles, and paragraphs on either side...
Status: Over 50 thousand swickis deployed, including spam and weirdly specific topic areas.
Chance of success: 400/1. Again, some useful technology, but confusing implementation that makes for an awkward search experience. The goal isn't to make search tougher, guys.

Hakia: Yeah she ugly, but she sure can cook!
Twist: Clusters results into categories, guessing what a search means.
Hubris: It's "the Web's new 'meaning-based' search engine." Except for, you know, the other ones. The CEO asks, "Are we the Web's equivalent of the first color TV?"
Results for "house": Impressive! Headlines about the HR and White House, then a string of categorized links to "House, M.D." information: show profile, episode guides, fan sites, and more. A shame the ads drew a different conclusion and showed me real estate ads. But what's this little face at the top asking bot-like questions? And does every result page really need an "e-mail this page" link? "Gee, you know my friend Sarah would sure enjoy this search result list!"
Status: "Beta 13." At public revision 13, maybe you can give it a real version number. In any case,
Chance of success: 50/1. Hakia is actually pretty neat, and it could eventually form part of a larger, slicker search engine. You know, like Powerset.

Freebase: At least the verb is fun
Twist: It's actually a collaboratively edited database. Judging from screencaps, it feels a bit like Wikipedia but bigger.
Hubris: Actually reasonable, even if it claims the goal of turning the whole internet into its database. All the hype's coming from outside sources like think-tank owner Tim O'Reilly.
Results for "house": I'm not on the exclusive user list, so I'll just have to wait to find out. Guess that screws up my search-turnaround-time stats.
Status: Private alpha.
Chance of success: Define "success." Will it go as big as Google? 60/1. Will it prove useful? 1.2/1.

(What will replace Google? Maybe a retooled search from someone like Ask.com, or a hacked-up tool from three guys in Russia that no one's heard of. But my money's on the Balkanization of search, in which users check Wikipedia, Yelp, or Flickr for specific types of searches. No wonder Google made sure to corner the two prime search niches of maps and video.)

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. Google him.