List of Natural Search Engines required

couldn't find a list doing a search!

[christopher]

Hi,

I did a search for natural search engines the other day, several engines were listed, but I've now forgotten the keywords I used lol.

Does anyone have a list of 'natural' search engines, is there such a list?

Perhaps someone could post the ones that use natural search. I though Ask did, but it's been suggested that they gave that up a while ago.

I thought subjex.com was a natural one?

regards

[Matt Probert]

I'm curious, being a former AI researcher, what do you mean by "natural search engines"?

Matt

[christopher]

Well, I'm not entirely sure, although Gimpsy says it is one.

Er, keyword we all know, but I thought natural search was like what ask does, ie you use words as if you are talking, asking questions etc, as this is how Gimpsy works and Ask, but Subjex.com uses AI in it's engine, so I assumed this was this natural search method?

I spoke to the owner of gympsy and I commented that his wasn't the only engine that used this way of searching, as did a search for 'natural' and a few engines came up such as:

MySearch (I think this is part of My Way?)

Ask

and a few others. It definetely said in the engine that I used, what the engine actually did, so I'm assuming that this info is now outdated? Nothing much in any of my searches at Yahoo, mentions natural search, so I dunno.

Any ideas about this?

regards

[martinibuster]

Dmoz [directory.google.com] has a list. So does Yahoo.

[mrdch]

There is no such list, to my knowledge, simply because there are so pitifully few SE or directories that attempt to use Natural Language search queries.

Ask were never truly a Natural Language search engine. They used Editor to sift through questions, find the appropriate answer (whatever that actually means is a debatable question) and file the question and the answer in their database. A short relection will immediately reveal that this cannot really be a workable solution. For example, people may phrase a virtually identical question in many different ways, which makes the whole process unbelievably tedious. It's no wonder that Ask abandoned this route - it's too expensive for too little benefit. Ask raised huge expectations which they were unable to fulfil. So, they let go of the pretence - but everyone still remembers them as the 'natural language' engine...

Until the AI tools will be developed to the degree that would allow a program to read and UNDERSTAND a text, the current state of the art 'indexing' scheme is ill equiped to deal with general Natural Language queries. Much like the iconic 'Elisa' program, that simulated a discussion with a Freudian Psychoanalyst, a Natural Language SE can succeed to do a good job only if it is confined to a well defined area. That's how Gimpsy manages to have a relatively good success rate in providing answers to Natural Language queries. Gimpsy only deals with ONLINE ACTIVITY. You must start each sentence with 'I want to' (not TYPE it - just assume that it is there), and continue to describe an online activity you wish to perform. Only then you can get some good results.