Ask.com’s Search Technology Advances
January 12, 2009
Ask.com keeps trying. On January 8,2009, the company announced “Semantic Search technology Advances from Ask.com.” You can read the company’s statement here. The company asserts:
In October last year we introduced our proprietary DADS (Direct Answers from Databases), DAFS (Direct Answers from Search), and AnswerFarm technologies, which are breaking new ground in the areas of semantic, web text, and answer farm search technologies. Specifically, the increasing availability of structured data in the form of databases and XML feeds has fueled advances in our proprietary DADS technology. With DADS, we no longer rely on text-matching simple keywords, but rather we parse users’ queries and then we form database queries which return answers from the structured data in real time. Front and center. Our aspiration is to instantly deliver the correct answer no matter how you phrased your query.
The idea is that a user–assuming there is enough traffic to make the site viable in 2009–can enter a query any way he or she wishes. The Ask.com system will figure out the query and provide a Direct Answer. Let’s check out the system.
My first query was, “What’s the daily show?” The system responded with the top result “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Good. My second query was, “What is a dataspace’s application?” The system responded by asking me the question, “What is a data spaces application?” The first result was a link to Sourceforge’s information about EQUIP2. Sorry, the correct answer was in my mind a link to the ACM papers about dataspaces. My third query was, “What is an information manifold?” This is no trick question because there is a technical paper with a title that contains the bound phrase “information manifold.” The Ask.com system asked me, “What is an information mannford?” I don’t know what a “mannford” is.
For the types of questions a middle school student might ask, the new system will work pretty well. For popular culture topics, the system will probably be better than some I have examined this week. For the types of queries I have about technologies that address the known weaknesses of traditional semantic processing, Ask.com won’t help me too much. That’s good. Knowing what questions to ask allows me to feed my goslings. Ask.com won’t put me out of job this year. One final point: I clicked on “mannford”. It’s a a city in Oklahoma. No dataspaces among that state’s wide open spaces. Look west, young search, look to Mountain View, California.
Stephen Arnold, January 12, 2009
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