Ask a question, and Powerset should have an answer, via the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, as well as an open, community created database called Freebase. The search site delves into the entries to pull out what it calls Factz about a query.

These Factz come back as a simple sentence, derived from what Powerset finds with its query; they appear as subject, relation, and object, according to the Powerset FAQ. “Factz do not always represent truth, but rather propositions that are asserted in the text of Wikipedia,” it said.

As Powerset isn’t searching beyond Wikipedia and Freebase yet, it’s too soon to consider whether or not their approach presents a challenge to the typical contextual search engine market dominated by Google.

At launch, Powerset impressed Danny Sullivan with the way the site “adds some nice value to Wikipedia.” Powerset’s ability to determine relationships across pages in Wikipedia helps it pull out some otherwise obscure points for further refinement of a query.

Powerset faces the problem of pulling in an audience and building a userbase, as all new applications do. Sullivan noted the heavy influence search engines have on driving traffic to Wikipedia, something that Powerset probably won’t receive in the same volume.

The real evolution for Powerset will come if and when it scales its index to handle web search. That’s no easy task, especially considering the billions of pages indexed already by the Googles and Yahoos of the world.

Scale doesn’t come cheap, which to us reinforced the idea we’ve always had about Powerset. We won’t be surprised if they sell out long before the site ever develops beyond what it is today.

But what Freebase (free + database, get it? Oh, those clever punsters) does differently – and they better hope Google doesn’t beat them to this – is that it pulls from every open database on the web, and Wikipedia as well, and puts them together in a neat relational environment.

So in effect, repeating the example given by OpenBusiness, a person could give a direct and complicated commands like "Find me child-friendly dentists within 10 miles of my home," and expect an answer.

Or, to fun it up a little, if you were just certain there was a connection between Ross Perot and Area 51 (the ears give him away), you could look for all photos of Ross Perot in the 1940′s and compare them to a decade later, and check those pictures against Roswell, New Mexico sightings, documents, whereabouts of the Pentavirate, known Illuminati and Mason agents, and planet alignments, you could do so.

Even if everybody already knows he’s actually and elf.

Danny Hills, the brains behind the Freebase operation touts his endeavor as a "Wikipedia for data," that includes both structured and semi-structured data from government, schools, businesses, restaurants, and products.

Hills is running the show under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows people to use the data in Freebase for any purpose as long as they give attribution. This approach, Hills believes, will spur the growth of the project.

Back in March, Tim O’Reilly predicted that Freebase would "huge" and "addictive." He notes that skeptics would write off the site as a "bastard child of Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project."

And yet and yet, he continues:

If Metaweb gets this right, this bottom up approach will build new connections between data, new categories and ways of thinking. It will likely be messy and contradictory for a while, but…they are building new synapses for the global brain.

And then come the robots.