Date: Fri 06-Nov-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

iinfo-Ask-Jeeves

Full Text:

INTERNET INFO FOR REAL PEOPLE: Questions in Plain English

By Bob Brand

Finding information on the Internet remains one of the leading frustrations to

both novice and experienced net-sters. Often the leading search engines --

Altavista, Yahoo!, Hotbot, Excite, and others -- overwhelm users with

information, much of it off-focus. In order to hone the query, boolean

operations (using "AND", "OR", "NOT", "NEAR") can help. For many people, this

becomes too cumbersome. A new approach is needed.

Wouldn't it be great if you could ask a simple question and get a simple

answer? That goal is now closer. Less than two years ago, a California company

developed the Ask Jeeves website. It spent 1« years building a natural

language parser (fancy name for taking apart a question and breaking into

smaller pieces) for the Internet and named it after P.D. Wodehouse's

know-it-all butler. The technology has been licensed by major sites such as

AltaVista and Netscape. More should follow.

Let's Try It Out

Go to the Ask Jeeves website (The AltaVista site provides almost identical

answers.) Enter the question: "What is the capital of Connecticut?" Here is

part of what appears on the screen: "I know the answers to these questions.

Please click the button next to the best one. Where can I find government

information of the type The Capital & State Facts for the state of

Connecticut?"

When you click on the "Go" button on the left side of the question, you are

rewarded with a page of information on the infoplease.com website that shows

the capitol of Connecticut is Hartford along with a history of the state.

Although the question is rather basic, the quality of the information found

for this question is high. However, with a more subtle query, such as, "Where

can I find reviews of Opera software?", Ask Jeeves knows much more about music

than web browsers. It did not make the connection that Opera is the name of a

browser that competes with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Additional Information

When answering the question, Ask Jeeves also supplies answers to closely

related questions along with matches from Yahoo!, WebCrawler, AltaVista,

Excite, InfoSeek and Lycos. The format is "drop down boxes" (click on the

small down arrow and more information appears.) This puts lots of information

under the user's mouse click. Neat!

An interesting feature of the Ask Jeeves site is a Peek through the keyhole.

In the middle of the home page is a window with the title "What People are

Asking!" When you click on the green "peek," every 30 seconds appear fresh

questions from people with pressing queries on their minds. With a mouseclick

on the "Ask" icon, the answers appear. Interesting.

Color me skeptical, but while the questions appear interesting, they may have

undergone a filtering process. In fact, I would not be surprised to learn that

some are "shaded" to supply answers that relate to sites that advertise on Ask

Jeeves. While I have no evidence, I have been on the Net too long to take all

information on face value.

Displayed In A Frame

One annoyance of the Ask Jeeves search is all sites that appear show an

advertisement at the top of the screen. Most search engines have not reverted

to this type of intrusion. Let's hope this does not signal a new direction in

web searching tool formats.

Nevertheless, Ask Jeeves (and a companion site Ask Jeeves for Kids) may reduce

some of the frustration in hunting for information on the Web. Give it a try.

In reviewing visitor activity to Internet Info for Real People articles, the

following questions were asked that caused them to land surfers on specific

sites. Here are three: How did Linda Tripp record Monica Lewinsky?; Show me

some categories of spam; and, Where can I find any websites that have Howard

Stern on them? Go figure!

URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of interest:

http://www.altavista.com

http://www.askjeeves.com/index.asp

http://www.infoplease.com

(This is the 127th of a series of elementary articles designed for surfing the

Internet. Next, Voice Attachments is the subject on tap. Stay tuned. Until

next week, happy travels through cyberspace. Previous issues of Internet Info

for Real People (including links to sites mentioned in this article) can be

found: http://www.thebee.com. Please e-mail comments and suggestions to:

rbrand@JUNO.com or editor@thebee.com.)