What this meant on the page changed over time, in stories and essays that ranged from playful postmodernism to sardonic surrealism, in language that dazzled with a semantic mix of high and low.
Powerset, the search engine that Pell created in 2003 and plans to open to the public in 2008, is one of a new crop of "semantic search" start-ups that aim to introduce natural language to the process of finding information on the Web.