A company called Powerset will be making a new natural language search technology available to the public in September. If the company’s claims are true (as credulously reported in the Technology Review), their search technology will be fundamentally different than the many algorithms that have been used in the past. Instead of developing results based on word and synonym matching, Powerset’s technology teases out the deep linguistic structures embodied in the search queries and in the searched text to make both more accurate and less obvious connections. Points to Powerset CEO Barney Pell for admitting that:

There was not one piece of technology that solved the problem… but instead, it was the unification of many theories and fragments that pulled the project together.

…and that most of the technology was licensed from Xerox PARC. If you’re interested you can sign up for the beta on their website. [kurzweilai]