Thought Bubble

Subject: What is an Answer Engine?

Category: Web

Posted by: james

On: 06.11.08

At: 03:11

There's a new kid on the search engine block: the answer engine. In fact it's so new it's not actually out yet, and it's not precisely a search engine either... let me explain.

Cambridge, UK, based tech company True Knowledge has created something with the potential to change the way we search the web for ever, but they need our help.

Traditional search engines simply take our search terms as best they can and try to match content on the web through relevance, so if, for example, we want to find out the 'time in new york' we type those four words into Google and it runs off and brings back over 580,000 'pages' that talk about 'time' and 'new' and 'york' and 'new york', etc. In fact the top result for that search is 'Time Out New York' - not precisely EST is it. With True Knowldege you get the actual time back for the same query (10:10:33 Eastern Standard Time on the 6th of November 2008 when I checked).

What True Knowledge's 'answer engine' is attempting to to is create an intelligence search bot that understands when you ask for the 'time in New York' that you are looking for the actual time zone and not Times Square.

In fact this is precisely what we want to do when we 'search', we just want to ask a question and get an answer, pretty obvious when we think about it, and because the technology has not been in place to cater for this we've had to pigeon our english into key words in order to find things.

So, how can we help? Well, they need to teach the bot what kind of questions people ask and train it to respond correctly, and the enable this they have created Quiz Bot try it out and see for yourselves and become part of the future of the internet.