Matt Patey pointed out to me a story in the Economist.com computer section with the title, From factoids to facts, Aug 26th, 2004. The story is about “Ask MSR” (MSR = Microsoft Research) a search engine that tries to answer factual questions using information on web pages through text manipulation.
WHAT is the next stage in the evolution of internet search engines? AltaVista demonstrated that indexing the entire world wide web was feasible. Google’s success stems from its uncanny ability to sort useful web pages from dross. But the real prize will surely go to whoever can use the web to deliver a straight answer to a straight question. And Eric Brill, a researcher at Microsoft, intends that his firm will be the first to do that.
Text analysis in bulk – it just goes to show that the internet and web are really just large concording projects.