Searching for answers

Talking about efforts to revamp their MSN Search service, Microsoft executives point out that many people search the Web not for sites, per se, but rather for specific pieces of information, and answers to questions. That, they say, is the thinking behind the proposed Answerbot, one of three supplementary search services discussed during an MSN presentation at an online advertising conference earlier this year.

As explained at the time, the Answerbot service is still under development and much further away from launch than the other two services, Newsbot and Blogbot. This week, however, the Economist magazine gave an interesting preview in this story about a Microsoft Research project, dubbed Ask MSR, that could serve as a prototype for the Answerbot service. Here's how the magazine explained the technology:

This program uses information on web pages to respond to questions to which the answer is a single word or phrase -- such as “When was Marilyn Monroe born?” Ask MSR starts by manipulating the question in various ways: by identifying the verb, for example, and then changing its tense or moving it into different positions in the sentence (“Marilyn was Monroe born”, “Marilyn Monroe was born” and so on). The resulting phrases are then fed into a search engine, and documents containing matching strings of words are retrieved. ... Once accumulated, the pile of documents is scanned for possible answers, and these are ranked by frequency. In practice, the correct answer appears in one of the first three places around 75% of the time.

The story notes that Microsoft is still looking to improve the results. But one reaction suggests that the underlying technology isn't the only aspect of the service that needs additional work. Snickers the TechnoBiblio blog: "For all the complicated research work that has gone into this, the best name they can come up with for the services are 'AskMSR' and 'AnswerBot'? "