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Microsoft To Launch 'Question' Site
prostoalex writes "Microsoft will try to make the search process more social, Business Week reports, by creating a question-and-answer Web site. They certainly are entering a quite crowded niche." From the article: "It's one of the many ways that Web companies, including Yahoo and Google, are trying to set themselves apart with social search, a targeted pursuit of information that's influenced by the preferences of a person's peer group. Social search is a method whose time has come, Osmer says. Microsoft research shows that generic search engines can't answer 50% of queries asked, he says. The new tool, whose name he didn't disclose, will be 'one of the larger projects for us' this year, Osmer says."
Hopefully not amateursexchange.com. Sounds like pain.
Fleur de Sel
There are so many questions to ask about this...my first response is that attempts to make information more friendly don't seem to have that great of a track record. Does anyone remember "Ask Jeeves"? Compare how its interface competed with the super-minimalist interface of google.
Anyway, there is this one quote:
Microsoft research shows that generic search engines can't answer 50% of queries asked, he says.
What type of questions were they asking it? Were they factual questions, like "What is the Capital of Burundi?", or were they process oriented questions, such as "How can you make cookies that are not too hard, but are cooked all the way through?" The first question, if you type "capital Burundi" into google, you get an answer for. Trying to search for information on the second would be much harder, I imagine.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Haven't librarians been doing this since time out of mind? I don't see what all the hoopla is about. Ask a librarian and you'll get good, timely, factual information and a lot of it. Ask one of these services and I shudder to think what you'll get.