I can't share Matthew Hurst's enthusiasm for Powerset, simply because I haven't been tracking the new NLP based search engine at all. But I did like how he teased a new direction for search innovation:
There are two key things here: the use of NLP and the disruption to the search interface. Finally, information retrieval will actually mean information retrieval, not document retrieval. One of the fundamental models of search that may be challenged in this new world is the fact that search engines are designed to take people to pages. The more we can understand and summarize the information on those pages, the weaker this model becomes and consequently advanced methods may herald a fundamental change in the 'search' business (which will need a new name pretty soon).I don't know if the keyword/document search model is dead, as some folks are claiming, but I know there's a whole lot of ways to organize the world's data that haven't been tried yet. Some of them might work.