Google and NLU

Page has said the following:

The ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.

 
Thank God he also admits that we're not there yet (although Google no doubt works hard toward this goal).
Natural language understanding (NLU) is so much more than a word for word "decoding" of the linguistic meaning. Understanding "exactly what [one] mean[s]" requires full-blown NLU (rather than simply NLP) techniques and approaches. Linguistic and pragmatic context for instance figure big in NLU. And so are some "usability" aspects of the query for instance the intentions of the querent, assumptions and underlying inferences.
The search engines of the future will allow for a query to actually organize matching knowledge they mine from the internet instead of simply match against some web text. So when you plug in a query like "what is the cost of buying a house in Costa Rica in 2009?", you will expect something more specific and on-point than a list of "relevant" documents.

Powerset (part II)

So, Microsoft acquired Powerset.
Microsoft always strived to catch up with and eventually challenge Google's search prowess. The acquisition of Powerset is part of this plan.
Powerset have been working off their San Fransisco HQs on a different type of search engine. One that is promised to be "natural language driven".
Here's an example of what the Powerset search can do (according to Powerset):
Instead of searching for book children (ala Google), imagine being able to search for: book for children, book by children, and book about children.
According to Powerset, "there would not be any way for us to properly express the query "books by children" without using the natural language". In other words, a natural language driven search would facilitate the natural tendency of users to phrase their queries using natural language rather than a string of words. So at least from a usability point of view, Powerset search seems pretty well-justified.
But does it work as promised?
I ran a few searches along the lines of books by children on the Powerset search engine and I got results which are at best as mixed as those from Google.
Watch this space for an analysis.