San Francisco based Powerset will be publicly launching a long-awaited beta version of the service in the coming weeks, the company told me yesterday. They are working on a new kind of search engine that will understand natural language searches and compete with keyword matching engines that dominate search today.

An early version of the search engine, which was demo’d to me yesterday at their offices, has been available to some users of their Powerlabs site. But for the most part, it’s been kept very quiet.

The early version of the service will serve as a showcase for the user interface and engine itself, but it will not have a full web index behind it. For now, Powerset will query only Wikipedia and Freebase. But when I tested the service I…