14 DAY TRIAL // Imagine a combination of a search engine and an encyclopedia that interacts with you the same way a teacher would, by giving you a straight answer and a list of places and books you might find as additional information.
Sounds interesting? I bet it does, and it is no longer a distant dream. Cambridge, UK based True Knowledge released its natural language search engine into private beta yesterday, according to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com. "The company aims to give appropriate answers to natural language queries, even if key query terms are not included in the data being indexed. Current search engines are unable to return appropriate results for these queries," he notes.
In other words, if the queries refer to a celebrity's marital status the search results page will firstly display an answer to your question based on the date that has been input and afterwards the links that any search engine would display. Users will be able to modify the information much as they can do that on wikipedia.org, bringing additional sources to back their version and interpretation of the answer. The movie that was released by the developing team showed for example that by typing "Abraham Lincoln" and hitting the search key would bring a character sheet that includes the term of his office, his predecessor and successor, the date and place of birth, his marital status and the page on Wikipedia where additional info can be found.
Arrington highlights that "True Knowledge is grabbing data from structured databases, like, for example, the CIA Factbook. In many ways, they [TK and Powerset, which is supposed to index the web and work to convert natural language queries into database-understandable queries] are more comparable with Freebase, a startup focused on gathering all the structured data on the web."
The release date is not available, but if the project manages to be the success it is anticipated to be, a merge with a larger search engine will be difficult to avoid.