Ask Jeeves Goes Back to Natural Language Searching

When Ask Jeeves hit the scene lo these many years ago, they were known for natural language searching. Ask a question, get an answer, or at least a pointer to a framed page. (This was a long time ago.) Now despite reorienting itself as a full-text search engine, Ask Jeeves is going back to its roots...

Now despite reorienting itself as a full-text search engine, Ask Jeeves is going back to its roots with a new feature called "Web Answers," which you can read more about in their blog at http://blog.ask.com/2005/05/were_not_just_f.html .

Here's how they describe it: "Web Answers is a new technology that, through a combination of our NLP expertise and Teoma search, harnesses the information out there on the open Web to find you answers…in real time."

Nice to see Teoma get some front-time; it's not a bad search engine. If I recall correctly, the "old" Ask Jeeves NLP relied on answers that had been found and added to the database by an editorial staff. This looks like it relies on exterior sources and points to them directly instead of going through an editorial filter, which of course opens it up a lot more.

Since it's early and I'm groggy, I opened my questioning with "What is the meaning of life?" Instead of giving me 42 as an answer, Ask Jeeves gave me three answers. One was for a self-help book site -? I guess that's what I get for asking silly all-encompassing questions.

So back to: "Who shot Alexander Hamilton?" Ask Jeeves responded with 19 different answers, including several from Wikipedia. Strangely enough the answers from Ask Jeeves seemed to focus on the same sentence in many of the pages, and not on the greater context of the page; most of the pages I got in return contained a trivia list and the sentence: "Alexander Hamilton was shot by Aaron Burr in the groin." (While this sentence does answer the question, it provides no context of information and no context of credibility whereby I might check the answer.)

Actually the Web search answers that came AFTER the Web Answers themselves were much more relevant and useful than these Web answers.

I tried "who won the world series in 2003?" and there were no Web answers to that. Okay. I tried "What is high fructose corn syrup?" I got two results. The first page was a very clear and straightforward page, brought to you by the Corn Refiners Association. (So you might want to watch for bias.) The second group was a speech from the International Monetary Fund, which contained the sentence "High fructose corn syrup is a cheaper and attractive alternative, especially for producers of soft drinks who are major users of sweeteners."

I like the idea of Web Answers, but I didn't particularly like the results. While the technology is excellent at focusing on sentences that answer questions, there were many times when the sentence was just part of a page and didn't provide a greater context of information. Perhaps there could be a second step that identifies key words in the questioner's sentence and then checks for keyword density of those words on the page? Or something? Just so there's more context...

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