But that doesn't mean Google's engineers are idly watching semantic search from a distance, says Norvig.
Monster.com is staking its future on a version of semantic search called 6Sense, used in its SeeMore and Power Resume Search products.
The first, semantic search, allows for a more sophisticated interpretation of text.
And the company, like semantic search competitors Hakia, Cognition Search and Lexxe, aims to do more than just answer questions posed in complete sentences.
Word order isn't the only factor that becomes more fluid with semantic search: Search terms and result terms no longer need to match exactly.
That doesn't mean that semantic search won't someday offer results that Google doesn't, says Chris Sherman, a search engine analyst and blogger for Search Engine Land.
These acquisitions include Jambool (a social gaming site), Metaweb (a semantic search engine), and Angstro (a social networking startup that pulls data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).
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One person briefed on Google's plans said the shift to semantic search could directly impact the search results for 10% to 20% of all search queries, or tens of billions per month.
The beauty of our advanced search technology is that we will ultimately allow almost any type of semantic search and Eikon does the majority of the analysis and constructs what I want on the fly.
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Then there is artificial intelligence in the form of high-speed semantic search capability (pioneered by Blackstone Discovery in Silicon Valley) that can do the work of hundreds of para-legals in a fraction of the time and a small percentage of the cost.
Google also hopes the change to semantic search will entice some people to stay longer on the search site, said people briefed on the plans, amid competition with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter Inc. that are claiming more Internet users' time.
Powerset, the search engine that Pell created in 2003 and plans to open to the public in 2008, is one of a new crop of "semantic search" start-ups that aim to introduce natural language to the process of finding information on the Web.
Some semantic-search experts also believe the move will help Google to keep up with Facebook Inc.
Google also currently has some other semantic-search elements, such as the ability to assess what the web collectively thinks are the most significant items associated with certain keywords.
To provide answers that aren't already in Google's ever-expanding database, the company will blend new semantic-search technology with its current system to better recognize the value of information on websites and figure out which ones to show in search results.
While a keyword job search for "certified public accountant" might turn up ads seeking a small-business chief financial officer who is also a CPA, semantic-search software would intuit that the user is looking for accounting jobs and list only those openings.
The company's thousands of engineers are looking at how to incorporate semantic analysis into a search algorithm.
There is a huge opportunity for software research being done in semantic analysis, unstructured search techniques, and so on, that can be applied in this business.
In a similar vein by starting to include the tags and descriptors defined by semantic web standards into its search index, web users suddenly have better reasons to use them.
Dr Decker said the advent of the semantic web promised to make a search much more productive.
Google's Peter Norvig, the search giant's director of research, knows just how complex semantic algorithms can be: His Berkeley Ph.
Amid the semantic fervor, however, one big problem looms: So far, neither search engine seems to achieve anything that Google can't.
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