In an article published on The New Your Times last week, Miguel Helft writes about Powerset licensing technologies that might rival Google one day. For all the webmasters optimizing just for Google out there, this is somehow distressing. The “optimize for the user” advice finally pays off.

You all know that Google disregards usual words from the natural language. That’s why SEOs usually recommend writing page titles that don’t incorporate terms like “the”, “in”, “a” etc. Powerset is going to utilize those words to understand the topic of the search and deliver content that is more related to the “natural language”. So if you had high rankings for web pages with tiles optimized for Google, the websites that have logical, natural language titles, will soon do better.

Powerset is really counting on PARC’s natural language technology to rise above Google. And I really wonder: is Google on shaking ground? Are we going to see the giant weakening? Or are we going to see a new Google algorithm implemented before Powerset even having the chance to become a search engine?

In my opinion, being able to search the Web using natural language will change the SEO industry as well and the natural language technology will lead to something better than Google’s personalized search.