I admit it; I still dig natural language search engine 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/poster/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.
Another LLRX tipster.
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