A New Search Engine Swingly Sticks to the Facts

For an area as entrenched as the search market, there’s certainly been a lot of activity lately. The Blekko search engine has just entered a private beta phase and now Swingly, a search engine / questions and answers (Q&A) site hybrid, is opening up a little bit as well.

While Swingly can be rightfully considered a Q&A site, you use natural language to perform queries on facts, it is closer to Google, or perhaps Wolfram Alpha, than to Quora and Facebook Questions.

“While keyword-based search is great for a lot of things, there are times when it just lets us all down. For starters: we think it's crazy that most search engines leave you to scan zillions of search results just to find the one piece of information you need,” Swingly wrote on its blog.

“Snippets help, but they're not really the answer if all you're looking for is, well, an answer. At Swingly, we think that it should be a search engine's sworn duty to find the particular piece information that you're looking for, no matter if you're asking a question like,” it added.

That pretty much sums it up, Swingly aims to provide users with an answer rather than links. But it doesn’t rely on humans for this, instead it scours the web, pairing up questions with answers. So far, Swingly says it has indexed 100 billion pairs, and the site has just started letting people in.

Those who had a chance to use it came away with mostly positive views. While the site isn’t perfect, nobody expected it to be, it does very well with certain types of questions.

As long as the question is asked in plain language and refers to a straightforward fact, Swingly does well at retrieving the answer. It remains to be seen how well it handles scale, in terms of users and questions asked, but it’s off to a promising start. You can request a beta invite at the site.