Monday, November 15, 2004

New Microsoft Search Engine

Microsoft is set to kick off yet another internet search engine. The search engine will be able to find sites that are geographically close to you and be able to accept natural language queries.

Natural language queries are questions you can ask a program and have it understand what you mean and produce results. Microsoft gives the example of What is the capital of Turkey? The seems to work fine until you flip the question around and ask "What country has Ankara as its capital?". Now its not so smart. Natural language processing has never really worked perfectly and you are likely to get your share of bizarre results. Its really kind of a useless feature.

With a gazillion dollars to spend on marketing Microsoft may tip the balance against Google. Thus, a crappy incomplete product will become the universal standard.

You can try out the beta version here.

More articles here.

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