Meet Swingly, a Q&A tool powered by robots, Josh Lowensohn, Web Crawler (Aug 16)
Another approach to Q and A - have robots collect the answers from websites.
"Swingly is a machine-generated answer engine that contains somewhere around 100 billion to 150 billion question and answer pairs."
"But machines aren't perfect, which is why Swingly takes a hybrid approach to improve its answers. If someone is searching for an answer, and they know more than the system, or discover a better answer from one of its links, there are ways to suggest changes to the results."
Ranking algorithms work on "trust" and timeliness of results.
Also -Swingly: New Search Engine Reveals Just The Facts, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Aug 17)
"Swingly performs best when you search for facts — like Who, What, and When. It seems to do okay with some Where questions, but not with others. "
Swingly is in private beta - must login and request an invite code.
Posted by Gwen at August 31, 2010 11:48 PM