"Delivering the best answers though innovations in semantic search technology is the direction in which the search industry is headed, and Ask is best-placed to lead the industry in this regard given our database of hundreds of millions of questions, and our core search technologies," said Scott Kim, Ask.com’s EVP of Technology. 

"With countless answers on the web, consumers face challenges in getting the answer they’re looking for due to varied formats, redundancies, and junk answers. The Ask Q&A channel aims to cut through the clutter – and with today’s advancement, we’re well on our way," he added.

Last fall, Ask launched its own core search technology, and it has achieved the 300 million Q&A pairs through crawling and indexing questions and answers from "numerous and diversified sources" across the web. From there, Ask says it applied its semantic search technology advancements in clustering, rephrasing, and answer relevance to filter out insignificant and less meaningful answer formats.

"The result is a Q&A database that is fine-tuned to give consumers the best answer, the first time, every time through streamlined, localized, concise results to their questions," explains Ask. "For example, the question ‘How do I train my dog?’ yields in-depth answers with step-by-step instructions from a series of diverse and authoritative sources across the web – giving Ask.com searchers a selection of options and resources they can use to take action."

It should be noted that Ask’s Q&A results are also blended into its regular search results. The database can be searched specifically by using the "lots of answers" link on Ask’s homepage.

Ask.com is used three times more than any other search engine for search queries that are in the form of a question, according to research from comScore. Ask says its own research indicates that user frequency, retention, and loyalty are significantly higher within the Ask.com Q&A channel specifically.

Not many users will actually see these results yet as the Powerset Blog notes. They are simply running some tests. After some testing projects, they have big plans to use Powerset’s technology and Live search’s combined to feed each other, presumably to achieve the most relevant search results possible.

Test 1 – Expand the number of queries for which Live Search shows Answers.

Test 2 – Use Powerset’s semantic technology to generate improved captions for Wikipedia articles.

Test 3 – Use Powerset’s Factz extraction to generate a list of related searches for a set of queries.

Unfortunately, I am not one of the few "lucky" ones to be able to see the tests, but the Powerset Blog provides some screenshots of results. For a demonstration of what Powerset does, check out this video:

Will Microsoft make up some of that search market share with Powerset? Maybe, but I don’t expect them to make a huge dent in Google’s. Like Jason said before, it’s Google’s brand that it hasn’t been able to overcome, and that brand is stronger than ever. Google Killer? I doubt it.

Perhaps it was the hype of video search engine VideoSurf (I’m still awaiting my invitation on that btw) that got this kicked into gear. Those who have had a chance to use that seem to think quite highly of it. Basically, it uses visuals throughout the videos to identify relevant results. Whether or not a certain company will try to acquire VideoSurf down the road remains to be seen (but you can imagine what it would be like if they did…eh? eh?).

But that’s neither here nor there. Google’s dealing with audio right now and seems to be making strides, though it is still far from perfect. The transition (or translation, depending on how you want to look at it) from audio to text is a bit rocky as some excerpts from this Barack obama speech illustrate:

For example, "sex" is really "since" (I wonder how it would pick up Tiki Barber’s recent slip [may contain unsuitable language]). That’s why the project is in Google Labs though. It’s not an official release, and it will likely be improved upon. Frederic Lardinois Read Write Web suggests some additional improvements:

It would be extremely useful, for example, to be able to sort videos by date. Right now, they are always sorted by relevance, though in this fast-paced political season, it is often more important to know when somebody last used a certain phrase.

Also, while the variation on the YouTube video player Google uses here is well suited for this task, you cannot embed the videos on your own site. All you get is a link to the video on the Audi Indexing site.

The nice part about the interface is that you can jump directly to certain parts of the video based on the search results. As you can see in the above image, there are play buttons next to each one.

Despite the current kinks in the project, it is evident that video search on the whole is on the way up in terms of usefulness. I just wonder how long it will be before video and image search produce just as relevant results as regular text search. It might be a while before it gets to that point, but the light at the end of the tunnel seems a little closer these days.

Update: I have now received my invitation for VideoSurf. I’ll have to do some experimenting with it.

If you take the top 5 search engines, you’ll see that they all do about the same job of providing accurate search results. Instead, the race has moved on to who can launch the most features and products.

Anyway, a new study out of France confirms that Yahoo and Google are pretty much the same. The most interesting data is that, while true that most search engines are equal in relevance, they still all do a pretty poor job in satisfaction.

Google and Yahoo tied for first place, with a rating of 2.3, but the most striking result is undoubtedly the extremely low level of user satisfaction. None of the search engines even passed (2.5 out of 5)

Via Battelle.

Add to DiggThis

Technorati:

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.