Didn't PowerSet become Bing, for the most part? I remember when Bing was originally launched, they flaunted it because it could show useful information instead

Didn't PowerSet become Bing, for the most part? I remember when Bing was originally launched, they flaunted it because it could show useful information instead of just "search results." (The feature seems to be scrapped now, but just in case you don't believe me - here is an ad that 'claimed' this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHmzzLt8WFA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHmzzLt8WFA). It seems NLP is a problem that the author seems to underestimate. IIRC, real speech recognition is a Strong AI/AI Complete problem. For a machine to detect the nuances in regular speech requires that the machine be as smart as at least a small child. I don't have a lot of knowledge in AI so take my statements with a grain of salt. (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach was a great book, but it made me realize I am not really interested in the field). If we ignore the pragmatic step, you aren't really doing NLP anymore, but just really fancy keyword matching. The query "Can your site be accessed without using Internet Explorer?" is just broken down with its syntax ("Your site", "accessed", "without", "IE", I'd imagine) and then each term is either translated into a keyword or an operator (semantics). The you end up with Google:Hackernews accessed NOT Internet Explorer (maybe) when what you really wanted was something closer too "list of supported web browsers" union "internet explorer". Without the pragmatic step there isn't any way to translate "accessed .. IE" to "list of supported web browsers" Maybe I'm missing something, but the whole pragmatic step seems to be the bread and butter of NLP, anything else just seems to be advanced querying. The whole pragmatic step could answer : "Can your site be accessed without using Internet Explorer?" "Does your site support Internet Explorer" "Is Internet Explorer supported" "Can yr site b acccsseed wit IE?"