BrainBoost Natural Language Engine

A few years ago, natural language search engines were all the rage. Bunches of sites on the Internet promised prompt answers to the question, "Why is the sky blue?" and other natural language search conudrums.

The noise has died down a little -- okay, a lot -- but there's still a natural language search engine here and there. One of them is BrainBoost ( http://www.brainboost.com ) , which not only pulls question answers from the Web, but also from recent news.

I tried running the search with a couple of my standards: Why is the sky blue? and How tall is a giraffe? Both these searches worked fine, though the sky question had far more results than the giraffe question. Results include the answer pulled from a page and the URL of the page. There are also three little icons: a "thumbs-up" icon lets you indicate that a particular page answered your question, an icon for opening the page in a new window, and a link to "snap open" the document so the excerpted sentence is at the top of the page. Sometimes it's a little hard to spot -- if you're going to modify it enough to put an anchor at the top how about a little highlighting as well?

I had a little trouble with the news search, but I think it's more because I didn't know what kind of questions to ask. "Where's George Bush?" got spotty results. "How many troops are in Iraq?" found two relevant results. "What did Art Carney do?" found a few results.

Posted in the following categories: Searching-Natural Language
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