As such, Powerset's search engine holds the promise of fundamentally changing people's expectations for search engines by, in theory, offering a smarter, more efficient experience.

However, Powerset's beta version, while delivering impressive results, has a limited scope and index, leaving unanswered questions about its ability to work its magic at the massive scale of Google's keyword-based search engine.

"We're changing the way information is searched by doing a much deeper analysis of the pages we index," said Scott Prevost, Powerset's product director.

Keyword engines treat pages as word bags, indexing their content without grasping its meaning, he said. Meanwhile, Powerset's engine, applying technology developed in-house as well as licensed from Xerox's PARC subsidiary, creates a semantic representation by parsing each sentence and extracting its meaning. "Meaning is what we index," he said.

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