Natural Language Tool On Lycos Finance

Terra Lycos has teamed up with iPhrase to create a natural language query tool for Lycos Finance at http://finance.lycos.com/home/iphrase/overview.asp . This search tool allows you to ask questions about stocks instead of trying to figure out the proper search.

I asked, "What is Gardenburger's PE Ratio?" Unfortunately it couldn't answer me, providing instead PE information for several different sectors. I took a different tack and asked "What is GBUR's PE Ratio?" It didn't know that one either. But that might be because of where it's listed, because "What is Amazon's PE Ratio?" worked fine, as did "What is Tootsie Roll's PE Ratio?" But sometimes the expectations of the language are a little funny.

For example, if I ask the site, "What grocery retail stock has the best PE ratio?" It gives me the stock with the highest PE ratio. I don't know too much about stocks but I thought the lower the PE ratio, the better. If I ask "What grocery retail stock has the worst PE ratio?" I get the lowest PE ratio.

But sometimes "best" works fine. I get appropriate results for the question "Which five grocery stocks have the best price?" and the question, "Which ten technology stocks have the best market cap?"

You can also compare companies -- you don't have to put it in the form of a question, either. "market cap for cmgi, looksmart, ask jeeves" provides what you'd expect. "chart for cmgi, looksmart, ask jeeves" provides only links to three separate charts -- not one chart with the three stocks included.

All the natural language tools I've used have their little quirks and this one is no exception. But it's worth a look.

Posted to Business-Financial