Powerset still doesn't have anything to show for. I actually got a "beta" invite to find a bunch of "custom" searches that you can vote on and grade them. Heh! Imagine if Google said: "sure, you can search for anything as long as it's one of these 10 terms."

Powerset is just a giant hype machine that will eventually fail. People are conditioned to type a word or two into a search field and get an answer they want. No one wants to type long questions and any company that believes they can somehow change the behavior of the masses is highly delusional.

I was messing around with mechanical turk, these are on there too. I didn't get an invite, but I did answer a few to try out the turk.

Google did not invent a new way for people to search, they took the way people were used to search and made it return more relevant results. I believed Powerset was bound to fail from the beginning. the problem is when folks search for email, for files on a machine, for files on P2P networks or for web pages on Google they use the same keyword based method.

It might certainly be useful to have a semantic search capability for some obscure searches but that would work better as a Google add-on (and with all the engineers Google has in-house if building such a technology was worthwile they would do it).