Ask Introduces Related Questions, ResearchBuzz (May 25)
Tara Calishain is right - the new related questions at Ask.com are "downright weird".
Ask appears to be using its Q&A base to generate these.
On my question - who found the northwest passage - Ask presented -
Who Discovered the Northwest Passage
Who Discovered the Mississippi River
Who Was the First to Search the Northwest Passage
Who Discovered the St Lawrence River
Did Lewis and Clark Find the Northwest Passage
Who Searched for the Northwest Passage
I don't see the connection between northwest passage and Mississippi, but there was one with the St Lawrence since Jacques Cartier did think the river, which he "discovered", would ultimately lead to China.
The related question - Who Discovered the St Lawrence River - came from answers.ask.com.
The Lewis and Clark related question came from something in wiki.answers.com. One of President Jefferson's objectives for the expedition was to have them find a water passage to the Pacific.
Specificity, in my view, doesn't really improve on the second level. For Did Lewis and Clark Find the Northwest Passage, we get --
Who Discovered the Northwest Passage
Who Found the Northwest Passage
Who Discovered the Pacific Ocean
What Did Lewis and Clark Discover
What Animals Did Lewis and Clark Find
What Plants Did Lewis and Clark Discover
But mostly, these related questions don't strike me as effective discovery tools - the connections are often tenuous and remote - there because some words happened to be on the same page and not because the page was about the topic of search interest. Ask is also drawing on phrasing in Q&A services, not the best source of information.
Posted by Gwen at May 26, 2010 02:30 PM