Web Answers: Another Cool New Feature on Ask Jeeves

In the last blog we talked about Ask Jeeves new "focus/Zoom" feature that will help refine searchers' queries by expanding the 'related topics' search suggestion category. As promised, in today's blog, I will introduce you to another cool new feature on Ask Jeeves that will make searchers' whole process of finding answers to questions less cumbersome and more interesting as well as fast.

This new feature is called Web Answers and it digs and excavates web pages in real-time looking for answers to queries formulated as questions. A somewhat similar facility was being offered earlier also by Ask Jeeves through their "Smart Answers" option, but the difference and improvement now is the extraction of answers directly from the content found on the open web instead of using structured infromation from other sources, like Wikipedia, etc.

A thing to note is that 'Web Answers' feature is functional or activated only if you enter your query as a question to trigger Web Answers. In other words, this feature will work well if you enter a question as a query and not a keyword or a phrase. For example,the query "location America" will not provide you the answer, but rephrasing the query as "Where is America" will give you instant answer with the help of the Web Answers feature.

It's not only Ask Jeeves that is providing direct answers to questions. Google has recently come out with its own question answering feature called Google Q&A that digs out open web content (including Wikipedia) for giving answers. Similarly, MSN search provides answers to searchers' queries from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia only when that information is relevant to a particular query labeled as "Answer" at the top of the search results. As far as yahoo is concerned, it does not have any specific feature that answers questions, but has some other search methods that provide answers to questions.

What makes Ask Jeeves feature stand out from others is the ability to analyze comprehensively the web content in real-time, as per the searchers' query. But as every new invention and discovery has it's ifs and buts, so does this new feature too. The one grey area in the feature's functionality is the fact that the answers provided may not be accurate or authentic or may even at times be totally wrong or satirical.

Sometimes the searcher might be confused when confronted with multiple answers to a question. Though this is a useful aspect of the feature as there may be questions that are debatable or have more than one alternatives, but this can also result in complications and problems for the searchers as they may not seriously rate the quality of the answers they get.

There is a solution to this problem too as all sources of information are listed for ensuring the accuracy and validity of the answers.The only thing required is awareness among the users to always view and consider the source to confirm the authenticity of a result.

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