Essential Search - Google's 911 Reputation and Jeeves' 411 Moves
Known for its puckish view of online life, The Register relates an anecdote from a recent conference in which someone apparently turned to Google to figure out what to do when a loved one was having a heart attack - rather than calling an emergency phone number first. The good news: the person got quick attention, and eventually recovered thanks to surgery. This "Google is God" reflex, though, does not always give such perfect endings to desperate searches for basic needs. Ask Jeeves is beginning to take a broader approach to intuitive searches, according to Search Engine News.com. Like Google it provides specific results to normal human questions such as "weather in Houston", but unlike Google's contextual links for a similar query, Jeeves' provides the actual information that people are seeking in the search results. Though Google's long-term goal is to get search engines to emulate the human responses that people expect to natural queries, this was Jeeves' early stong point, a point on which it is builiding more strongly. Expect many others to use natural language processing as they follow suit.