Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has a story about Powerset and the hype surrounding the Silicon Valley startup. Having not heard about them before today (have you been living under a rock? yes I have), I was interested to read about a company that is working hard towards the goal of killing Google. A NY Times article published on Friday talks about Xerox PARC's announcement that they are licensing "a broad portfolio of patents and technology" to the guys at Powerset, which gives them their key ingredient: natural language search technology.

Interestingly enough, Search Engine Watch's Danny Sullivan has a lengthy article (via TechCrunch) from October of last year that talks about natural language search as nothing but pure hype. The company is well-funded, however, and as the TechCrunch article says: "if we start to see some of those PhDs leave Google and join Powerset, that will be the first sign that the company is really on to something big."

TechCrunch article, NY Times article and Search Engine Watch article