For years, Ask.com has been trying to supplant Google as the Internets search leader, but this week the company has announced that it is headed in another direction. In truth, Ask never really got all that close.

A handful of start-ups are getting ready to challenge Googles predominance in the Web sleuthing world by offering whats known as semantic search.

The companies—Powerset, Hakia, Cognition Search, Lexxe—are trying to develop a search technology that would allow you to look for material on the Web while writing like a normal, educated human, instead of just entering keywords, and dropping all the in-between stuff that gives us those wonderful things called sentences.