AnswerFarm Technology from Ask.com, Ask.com Blog (Jan 14)
Ask.com has been blogging about its "semantic" technologies. This post gives us some idea of how the Q&A works.
"The technology behind the Ask Q&A channel is called AnswerFarm technology. We built it by crawling and extracting question/answer pairs from across the web – more than 100 million question/answer pairs from several hundred thousand sources – and it is, no doubt, the most comprehensive and diverse repository of question/answer pairs in the world."
From Semantic Search Technology Advances from Ask.com we learn that Ask can get into databases with its DADS technology - Direct Answers from Databases.
"With DADS, we no longer rely on text-matching simple keywords, but rather we parse users’ queries and then we form database queries which return answers from the structured data in real time. Front and center. Our aspiration is to instantly deliver the correct answer no matter how you phrased your query."
But they are "trialing" all this good stuff on sports, and specifically NASCAR.