The face of a warrior?

Startup Powerset is raring to engage market leader Google in search engine battle, by providing results from more natural language searches, reports BusinessWeek.

Powerset's web crawler analyzes the text on a webpage to draw a general sense of every word and sentence's meaning. The company, which will not debut the product until early 2008, hopes to provide results that closely match what people mean to search for, rather than taking text queries at face value.

The technology will likely attract early adopters, the advertisers that love them, and VC cash flow. But skeptics point out that natural language search has been tried before and simply never found an audience. And the nuance of even common phrases change all the time in digital culture. Consider LOLcat fever.

Powerset is testing its platform within the closed ecosystem of Wikipedia before availing it to the rest of the web.