The new BrainBoost search engine answers your questions

Welcome BrainBoost, the 100% automated natural question answering search engine.

(December 11 2003) Admittedly, it has been done before. Ask Jeeves started out as a search engine capable of answering "natural question", i.e. search queries formulated as regular questions: "Where can I find information about how to search the Web?" instead of "web searching tutorial".

However, Ask Jeeves has partly relied on a directory of questions and sites edited by human beings in order to deliver such queries.

The new BrainBoost search engine, on the other hand, tries to analyze the meaning of the question at hand automatically and then match the query with web pages that include sentences that (hopefully) give a relevant answer.

This is what in scholarly terms is called Natural Language Processing (NLP), i.e. "the field of inquiry concerned with the study and development of computer systems for processing natural (human) languages." (Glossary).

Does it work? We asked BrainBoost about the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

"Who was Carl Jung?" gave us the answer "Carl Jung was born in Kesswil, Switzerland." and a link to a site that gives rather detailed information about the man.

The question "When did Carl Gustav Jung die?" gave us two answers: "Birth of Carl Gustav Jung (died 1956), founder of Analytical Psychology." and "Carl Gustav Jung died in his home in K?t, Zurich, June 6, 1961."

The first answer is clearly wrong -- Jung did die in 1961 -- but given that BrainBoost has been so kind as to deliver two answers, the researcher is given the opportunity to check the facts. You cannot expect a search engine to do an information quality check for you.

The question "Where can I find a web search tutorial?" listed a reference to the Pandia Powersearch page. Not bad at all!

Given that this is a beta test version of the search engine, we are quite impressed. It is definitely a bit slow, but that is to be expected for a beta test version.

The design of the web site is clean and uncluttered. The results are presented as answers to your question, and this is text fetched from the relevant web page itself. You may then open that particular page within a frame on the result page itself or in a separate window.

The founder of BrainBoost, Assaf Rozenblatt, tells Pandia that he started BrainBoost a bit over a year ago with the simple goal of creating a search engine that would deliver on the promise of giving short concise answers to natural language queries.

"As I explored this domain through observation of commercial and academic endeavors I found that none of them were remotely satisfactory," he says. "I then set out to solve this problem, and today I am proud to be able to say that BrainBoost is the most successful natural language question answering system on the net."

BrainBoost is a privately held company with a small team of technologists. The company is in the early stages of financing and the team says they prefer to keep a low profile until they have perfected the technology.

That being said, Rozenblatt & Co are currently in strategic talks with several of the big players in the domain for potential partnerships. Hence the technology might end up being used by one of the major search engines.

We do not think they would mind if the readers of Pandia test the search engine. They need beta testers in order to improve the quality of search results.

BrainBoost
See also Internettbrus (article in Swedish)
SearchGuild discussion
ResearchBuzz on BrainBoost

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