From Natural Language to Dialogue Search Engines

Subjex.com ( http://www.subjex.com/ ) is a new search engine in beta. You've heard of natural language engines like Ask Jeeves, which look up pages for you based on a question? Subjex.com looks up pages for you based on a dialogue you have with it. I went to Subjex wanting to know about growing roses.

The first page is pretty straightforward; Subjex.com asks you what you want to know. I told it I wanted to know about growing roses. Subjex thought about it and came back with three possible candidates. Two things: 1) only three??, 2) the list was missing several things that would have given me clues as to the pages' fitness, like a longer summary or an URL.

Subjex.com asked me if I wanted more information. I did, on fertilizer. So I asked, "what kind of fertilizer should I use?" Subjex.com seemed to get a little distracted, providing me with three pages that were all about fertilizer and (as far as I could tell) very little about roses. So I paged back and revised my question:

"what kind of fertilizer should I use on roses?"

Ah. Two of the results were about fertilizing hardy shrub roses.

This is a good idea -- how better to refine a search than to have a dialogue-based interface to do it? -- so it's worth a look. But it would be aided greatly by more results per dialogue, and a larger summary so the usefulness of the results can be judged at least somewhat by the user.

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