What I hear you saying is...

Interesting news about Powerset getting of exclusive rights to use a Natural Lanaguage processing technology from PARC.

Powerset, a San Francisco search engine company, will announce Friday it has won exclusive rights to significant search engine technology it says may help propel it past Google. The deal is significant because practical use of linguistic technology has eluded Google. The giant search engine has said it wants to implement language-understanding technology one day. However, tests of linguistic approaches haven't made any difference in Google's results so far, it says. (from VentureBeat)

I had a chance to meet Powerset's CEO, Barney Pell, at a conference last summer and spent a few minutes talking with him about what they were working on. They hadn't (and still haven't) launched so he didn't go into specifics. But it was clear that he is really, really passionate about what they are working on. And now that Google has smoothly transitioned from David to Goliath, it would be a lot of fun to see another quirky young start-up come along and shake things up in the Search space...

But I'm sadly skeptical for 3 reasons:

1) How much better can Powerset be?
Google's search is not perfect, but it's pretty damn good. It's so reliable for most of my daily needs that I put it on par with trash pick-up or local anethesia: you don't really notice it until it's not working (and that's rare). It's a practically a utility like my water, electricity or phone. I'm comfortable with it and (unlike my utilities) it's free. So getting me to transition would take a radically better product.

2) Me no English
Jeeves tried Natural Language years back (with a presumably less robust application) and had to abandon ship. "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" may be natural language, but it is an awkwardly long query when entered on a keyboard. "What is the capital of Moldova?" may return "Chisinau", but so does "Moldova capital" in Google. It's shorter and easier, so it wins. I'm not sure I want to (or even can) re-train myself to think in natural language query when sitting at the keyboard. I already have too many years invested in reverse-translating my desired results into strings that will help Google return them. And it works.

3) I'm not going to tell my mom.
When Google arrived, it was a godsend to geeks everywhere -- They could pass it along to their less-technical family and friends as the go-to site for finding what they needed on the web. But they did this because they were using it constantly themselves. Even if Powerset is superior, it's going be hard for the potential first-adopters to transition -- which means the critical viral component of passing the news on to the masses will be cut-off at the roots.

Come to think of it, this whole thing kinda reminds me of the Dvorak keyboard:

Remember the Dvorak keyboard? It was designed to address the inefficient anachronisms of the QWERTY layout. The QWERTY layout was created in part to decrease the probability of metal typewriter keys from jamming. Not really a concern in this day and age, right? You'd think something better would come along... and something did: The Dvorak layout was invented to streamline the inefficiencies and arrange the keys in a manner that allowed dominant fingers to match with high frequency keys.

It's brilliant -- the way a keyboard layout should have been designed.

So why aren't you using a Dvorak keyboard today? Probably a lot of reasons, but one of them is that it was just too difficult to introduce. Yes, it was better than QWERTY but not enough to change people's minds or motivate them to re-learn a process that they'd invested signficant time in becoming proficient. Just like when the US government tried to introduce the metric system in the 1970s to grade school kids. No workie. Resistance.

For better or worse, I am a slave to the QWERTY keyboard, just like I'm a slave to my shorthand for finding results in Google. It's hard to say what kind of product Powerset will release -- there could be some very cool applications for voice, for example, where the required interface (i.e. you, talking) meshes quite nicely with Natural Language. But until they actually release something, I'll keep placing my bets on those crazy kids in Mt View.