I had asked for an account for some time now, but today the email finally reached my inbox. And I was really excited about seeing what all the hype was about [true knowledge]™!

P.S. Getting really excited to test out a search engine must mean I'm in the right job... 

What is [true knowledge]™?

In simple terms, it is a natural language search engine that lets users search by asking questions, and even lets them add or improve the knowledge that already exists (more about this later on). 

True Knowledge claims its technology "can represent the world's knowledge in a form that is clear and accessible to humans, as well as being comprehensible to computers." A pretty bold statement, and one that is prone to be viewed with some skepticism.

The main advantage they claim is that the computer actually knows what it is looking at (sort of), or at least the machine can read the information in context and so be able to produce valid or more complete answers, and not just throw pages at the user and let him/her find the answer.

How does it work?

Well, after I received my email I went and tried it out for a bit. I'd already seen some videos representing the technology, but nothings beats actually using the thing for yourself and comparing it to other major search engines, such as Google, Live, or Yahoo.

Oddly enough, the interface is pretty simple, and it mimics other search engines. It has a search input box below the number of "facts" [true knowledge]™ already has in its database. It resembles a little bit like the learning process of a small child: the search engine knows "95,652,532 facts about 3,436,184 things" - this values represent its knowledge base, its brains...

When you type something, a question, a fact, a person's name, the engine searches its facts database, and displays one or more results, but in form of answers, charts, etc. But no actual website. No URLs...

Is it any good?

My first search was: "How old is president bush?". 

I thought it was a very straightforward question to ask (even pretty obvious), and an American question, so it could be considered an easy first.

I got two answers related to the current and former presidents.

No pages to sort out, no complicated images floating by, nothing. Just plain answers. I'd already seen the videos, but I was actually pretty excited. There is a lot of hype around semantic search, and even Tim Berners-Lee is hyping the Semantic Web Roadmap this days. 

I believe most searchers are lazy and, although they are used to sorting results, they would prefer results were handed out to them like this. I mean, this is everything Ask Jeeves never was! (Damn you, Jeeves, in your tropical island retreat; may you choke on your cocktail!)

How does it handle hard queries? 

Well... that is a bit of a problem. I asked: "what is the best hotel for holidays in new york?" and no answer was given. For certain queries, the engine doesn't provide an answer and offers you the chance to wiki your way into its database.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: it's Wikia failure all over again! And yes, I also agree that this is a very dangerous path to go down for, and in my opinion, a stupid path at that. One can understand that the current database of facts is pretty small, but why rush for a Wikipedia model to improve it? 

Sure it's great that you can search for people's ages or biographies, but at some stage people will want to search for products, services, etc...what then? How can the semantic web respond to these queries?

Time for your feedback

Lots of questions arise from True Knowledge, and most of them are not answered by the folks who promise to answer all your query problems! Did any of you get these beta accounts? Did you try it out? Did you give it a test-drive? If so, how was it? Let's hear more about these exciting times in search!