January 25, 2010

Google Looks for Answers

Google Pulls Answers, Events Out of Search Morass, Research Buzz (Jan 25)

Google says it is better at answering factual questions. One method is by highlighting the answer. It does a good job on its sample question - How tall is the Empire State building? - but it takes a lot of tries to get it to work on other questions. Tara Calishain says that Wolfram Alpha is better at this type of question.

It will also highlight events in a "rich snippet" if the web developer has made use of the new format. Details are given in a Google blog post.

Posted by Gwen at January 25, 2010 04:19 PM