Get On the AnswerBus for Natural Language Searching

I admit it; I still dig natural language search engines though they aren't quite the big thing they were back in the heyday of Ask Jeeves and the (late, lamented) Electric Monk.

If you still want that natural language goodness but don't want to limit yourself to Ask Jeeves, check out the AnswerBus at http://www.answerbus.com .

AnswerBus is a project of Zhiping Zheng, who has a paper on it at http://www2002.org/CDROM/pos ter/203/ . It's simple to use, though -- enter a question. Instead of giving you a list of possibly-related questions, like AskJeeves, does, AnswerBus gives you a list of answers.

I started with the obligatory question, "Why is the sky blue?" and AnswerBus came up with ten possible answers, the first one -- which was a hyperlink from the phrase "The reason the sky is blue is very complex" -- being just fine. I then tried a question that's about the only ST:TNG quote I know: "Why is the sky black?" That one wasn't as easily answered, but I did get a relevant answer in #2 of the list of ten.

AnswerBus couldn't answer the somewhat obscure question "Who wrote Cocktail Time?" but had no problem with "Who starred in The Matrix?" It got wildly confused with the question "How many pounds are in a stone?" giving me a list of weights in stone and pounds. (I was able to figure out how many pounds were in a stone by looking at the weights.) "What's the weather in Boston?" went well, with answers linking to several different lists of weather. "What are the hurricane names for 2003?" popped the correct answer right up. A fun exploration.

Posted to Searching-Natural Language