UPDATE: April 2, 2021 – this post was published as satire on April Fool’s Day and is not factual
At its Inflame conference today, Microsoft announced a new low-code search engine for the Power Platform. Officially named PowerQuery, this product promises business users the ability to use search engines without having to use code.
PowerQuery allows any user—not simply developers—the ability to type text into a box and surface relevant results. Licensing has not been finalized, but anticipated pricing announced at the conference will start at only $10/user/month for the Per User plan or $1/search for the Per Search plan.
When asked about the name selection, a product team representative talked about the process. “We were asked to choose a word from Category A and a word from Category B. Category A just included the options ‘Power’ and ‘Data’. It didn’t feel like a data tool, so we went with ‘Power’. There were a few more options in Category B. We chose ‘Bing’ to align with our existing search engine, so we ended up with ‘Power Bing’. After we submitted it to Marketing though, they came back with ‘PowerQuery’. Finally, we typed ‘PowerQuery’ into Bing and did not get any results, so that sealed it. Ironically, this process took longer to finalize than the actual product development.”
Asked if PowerQuery would have any association with Power Query, Microsoft’s low-code data transformation tool, the representative couldn’t discuss all planned features. He did confirm that PowerQuery would have some level of integration with Power Query, but it would likely be one way. “I can guarantee that if you type ‘Power Query’ into PowerQuery, you will get results”.