Brainboost Unveils New Version of Its Search Engine

Brainboost, which has the cutest logo I've seen in a while, yesterday announced a new version of its "Answer Engine," which you might call a natural language search engine. It's available at http://www.brainboost.com .

The front page has in addition to a query box several categories and examples of questions. I went to the query box with my getting-to-be-standard question: "Who shot Aaron Burr?"

After thinking about it for a couple of minutes, Brainboost provided the correct answer. In fact, all the answers it provided on its page of results were okay. The results include the "answer" from a page, URL for the page, pointer to open the page in a new window, and a "Read More" link, which I guess is supposed to give more context about the page, but which I couldn't get to work.

I asked Brainboost a tougher question: How is lead toxic? In my experience question answering engines hate how questions. But brainboost performed admirably. The excerpted information was less than useful here, but the answer pages themselves were useful -- pages on lead toxicity, and a few news stories.

For a natural language engine -- heck, for any search engine -- Brainboost responded very well to my tests. The only thing I don't like is the lack of context for question answers. This is one search engine which would benefit a lot by having screen shots of resulting search pages in addition to the "answers" from the pages themselves.

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