Interesting article. I hope it works out for them. Search Startup Ready to Challenge Google Here's another about it: Powerset: Move Over, Google
It will be interesting to see if they do any better than any of the other social search engines. It seems people get excited about these new engines and there is a lot hype and then they kind of fade away and people default back to Google or Yahoo or whatever they were using before. It is not that I do not want them to succeed, it is just I am not sure how they will or can.
Do you really believe that Google only relies on keywords to rank websites? If you do, then you really haven't been studying search engines long enough. I'm not sure how long you've been following SEO, but this is old news. Google has always had Natural Language Flow as a part of their algo. Their algo consists of many different factors, not just one or two.
It has nothing to do with site ranking but how you search. Google search: Steve Jobs+ apple+ computer+first Proposed Natural Language search: what was the first computer developed by apple. Supposedly, this will bring up relevant info for your Natural Language Search. At least that's what Power set is trying to do. This is something Google has yet to figure out how to do. Type that into Google search see what your get.
As far as their demos is made, they have a simple limited set of pages to get information from. They will probably not know if they are "on target" before theyr start indexing the web. I wonder how they will deal with different languages and dialects though.