Answers.com Takes New, Old Approach to Search
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Is asking a simple question and getting a simple answer too much to hope for from today's search engines? For the most part, it seems that way. But Answers.com is trying to change that. The three-year-old search engine hopes to give answers to your natural language queries that will keep you coming back.
Answers.com claims to have “over four million answers...drawn from over 180 titles from brand-name publishers, original content created by Answer.com's own editorial team, community-contributed articles from Wikipedia, and user-generated questions & answers from Answers.com's industry-leading WikiAnswers.” In truth, Answers.com isn't so much a search engine as it is an information portal.
And under certain circumstances, this might be exactly what some searchers are looking for. For example, the WikiAnswers site, mentioned above, has seen its daily page views go from 250,000 in early 2007, when it opened, to more than two million as of March 2008. It was expected to reach 11 million monthly unique visitors in early June.
“People are going back to the answers format. They started that way, now they're going back to it,” noted Robert Formentin, vice president of advertising sales at Answers.com's parent company, Answers Corp. This company should know how people used to search; it has a certain amount of history in this space. Answers Corp. was founded in 1999, as GuruNet, and used to be available only through a subscription. Now it is completely free to the user, supported by advertising.
The site has so many tools and resources that it's difficult to do it justice in a simple review. For example, you can download 1-Click Answers (for Windows only) from the site, and then use Alt-Click on any word in any program to get a pop-up tool tip that gives you a concise answer defining the word; clicking on a “Read more” button gives you more information. There's the inevitable toolbars, of course, and a version of Answers.com that is optimized for mobile devices. You can personalize your Google home page to include RSS feeds from Answers.com. And I'm far from done.
But here's the important question: does it deliver on its promise? Can I really just ask it a question and get an answer? If it doesn't, it hardly matters what else it can do, right? So let's roll up our sleeves and put it to the test.
Next: Getting Some Answers >>
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