James Fallows column in
Sunday's NYT discusses some of the frustration with keyword searching
and the El Dorado of having search engines “just answer my
question.”  Fallows points specifically to work to develop Aquaint. 
The CIA, NSA and similar federal organizations are apparently quite
interested in the approach initially developed at Stanford University's
Knowledge Systems Lab.  Of deeper interest to serious researchers (or search-tool forecasters) than Fallows' column might be the lab's research papers.