The secretive search engine

Powerset, a San Francisco search engine company, has won exclusive rights to significant search engine technology it says may help propel it past Google.

The technology, developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley, seeks to understand the meanings between words, akin to the way humans understand language — and is thus called “natural language.” It has been thirty years in the works.

The move is significant because Google’s own technology, based on “page rank,” has been virtually replicated by other search engines like Yahoo and MSN, and so isn’t as difficult to emulate as it was a few years ago.

If VentureBeat is to be believed then Google has a to do a lot of catching up with Powerset when it comes to technology.Powerset let VentureBeat see a limited demo of the Powerset technology.

According to VentureBeat if we searched for “Who acquired IBM?” Google will give you lots of results about companies that IBM acquired, even though that’s not what we asked. Powerset, on the other hand, will give results of the companies that acquired IBM units, including Lenovo, and AT&T. Moreover VentureBeat said Powerset showed it can answer more complex questions.

Finally we might get to see a competition in Search. Hope there would be competition in OS development aswell