Natural Language Oracle – True Knowledge: New Search Technology from Cambridge #TG2009

by on July 17, 2009 at 5:36 pm

True Knowledge
True Knowledge

Last week in Cambridge, the Traveling Geeks met William Tunstall-Pedoe of True Knowledge.

True Knowledge bills itself as a question answering service — a more refined online search service.

Image representing William Tunstall-Pedoe as d...
Image byTrue Knowledge/True Knowledge

via CrunchBase

Instead of searching for words, you ask questions in natural language, and instead of getting a list of internet pages that may contain what you’re looking for, you get a concise direct answer. According to William, this is similar to Ask.com, but instead of human intervention, they’ve come up with new algorithms and data feeds that can automate the question-search.

True Knowledge has a huge database of facts (170 million and counting). For searchers, this translates into a powerful online personal assistant answering simple questions like When was Barak Obama born? and much more complicated ones like Who has been president of the US since John McCain was born? and How far is London from Michael Jackson’s birthplace? that require True Knowledge to deduce information based on the facts it knows.

True Knowledge has a free Firefox extension called Google Enhancer. After you install it, every time you search for something on the top search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com), the extension will also ask True Knowledge what you searched for and show you the results:

True Knowledge Results
True Knowledge Results

Here are photos of the TweetUp and the luxurious interiors of the Fitz.

Here is a photo of William and I at the Cambridge TweetUp at the Fitz Museum.

Susan and William
Susan and William

You can keep in touch with True Knowledge via their blog and @trueknowledge on Twitter.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]