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.