Search Engines Go to the Next Generation – Natural Language Search
Searching
(Image is in the Public Domain)
Apparently, there's a company named Powerset that's trying to implement natural language search for Internet searches. Granted, this has been tried before (Ask Jeeves), but never really worked. Ars Technica is listing Powerset as a possible competitor to Google, but cautions that Google will probably also include this technology soon (especially if Powerset shows any measure of success).
Describing natural language search is hard, but here's an example:
Searching for "book by children" and "book about children" should produce greatly different results, but search engines today generally throw out the prepositions and treat both queries the same way