Comments on: Ask and Jeeves answers

By: InnaBar

InnaBar — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 04:08:53 +0000

This post brought back some memories – when I first took Eszter’s survey, I also immediately turned to Jeeves on the wallet question, even though I have NEVER used Ask Jeeves before. And I would have never thought myself susceptible to pure marketing techniques on the part of the search engines (considering I actually understood why Google’s search algorithm was superior at the time:) Also, I was wondering whether Ask Jeeves performs any search query parsing beyond filtering out keywords from the questions, and it seems that they do. For example, queries “What is Purim” and “When is Purim” generate different and useful responses. I do wonder how much of that is automated and generalized – in other words, is there an editor at Ask Jeeves who prepared the content for the these two arguably common queries, or was this generated on the fly?

By: Gary Price

Gary Price — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 21:06:28 +0000

Janet: I would suggest taking a look at Clusty.com. http://www.clusty.com Not only useful results from multiple engine but dynamic clustering that can not only save you time but it can also expose results you might not see in a regular set of results. In some ways, the clusters are knowledge discovery tools. Also, Clusty.com offers a feature not seen elsewhere. Next to each result look for a magnifying glass icon. Click it and a “live version” of the results page is embedded into the results list. More useful (IMHO) than an old static image. Btw, if you think the results from one engine to the next are the same? Run some searches with Jux2.com and you’ll see that search engine overlap isn’t as great isn’t as many think. http://www.jux2.com

By: Janet H. Austin

Janet H. Austin — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 19:26:03 +0000

I prefer Dogpile.com as a multiple search engine,which uses Google as well as several other of the so-called hot searchers.Saves time and effort.As a mentor of mine said,”work smart;not hard.”

By: Gary Price

Gary Price — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:47:20 +0000

Ask Jeeves long abandonded the notion of using human to pre-build question and answer sets. Most of what’s being know is done through mining specialized databases (IMDB.com, Who2.com as examples). “We’re built to scale Smart Search with others people’s data.”—Jim Lanzone, VP at Jeeves From: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3370751 Also, the underlying database, ranking algorithm, etc AJ uses comes from its Teoma technology.

By: eudoxis

eudoxis — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:30:59 +0000

Are you saying that AskJeeves, contrary to marketing claims, does not use context filtering?

By: Gary Price

Gary Price — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:30:11 +0000

E- Our ResourceShelf.com blog has been tracking this kind of question answering services since back in 2003.

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:16:40 +0000

Ask Jeeves has been offering these services long before Google, April 2003 to be precise. Also, the first online calculator was offered by AllTheWeb months prior to Google’s. Yahoo also offers many shortcuts. This post has a Google overview. http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041112-191257