I don't see what they know that Google doesn't. Google certainly has no shortage of people familiar with symbolic natural language processing methods. It's not like Google hasn't read the major papers and books in that field. If the Xerox technology Powerset licensed has been published anywhere, Peter Norvig and lots of other people there have almost certainly read it very carefully.
you can take what you said and apply it to google and their published pagerank. or the establishment of the previous players.
as long as there is a lot money in search, there will be a lot of people competing for it, and people funding them. And the very least it will do is keep google on its toes, which is good.
speaking of which, yahoo's latest additions to its search are pretty impressive, i must say.
their front page is still a bit messy for my taste, but they've really upped the ante for google in ways that no other search engine i've seen thus far has.
