Natural Language Searching

A couple of interesting articles:

• Powerset: The search engine that would outdo Google
• Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend
• Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think

It's always fun to try to spot the next winner. This article is an advanced peak at a company claiming to be able to put more language understanding into searching. This of course is a better way of asking and answering questions than any of the viable search engines of today -- but, many people have tried to do this before and failed for a variety of reasons.

If these guys can actually:

• understand questions without limiting themselves to a specific domain
• understand web sites without limiting themselves to a specific domain
• do this quickly

then, they have a winner. Otherwise, it's more of the same hype and failures.