Search engines normally do a pretty good job of returning accurate results to keyword based searches. But because they understand natural language, you can’t ask Google or Yahoo straightforward yes or no question, just search through results until you find the information you need.
True Knowledge aims to give accurate answers to questions, even if keywords are not contained in the documents and webpages the search engine has indexed.
Rather than indexing the whole web, True Knowledge is handling only the conversion of search queries, grabbing data from structured databases.
According to the company’s founder William Tunstall-Pedoe, while normal search engines use statistical relationships between words to answer search queries, they are unable to make sense of the content of web pages:
“What makes our technology so ground-breaking is that instead of trying to teach a computer to read we have developed a way of capturing information as discrete facts that can be understood by a machine”.
“This creates a knowledge-base that is capable of learning, deducing the answer to a question from the information it already has and adding new information gained from interaction with the questioner to expand the depth and breadth of its knowledge.”
True Knowledge is similar to Powerset, another natural language search engine which aims to make search more accurate, though the new search engine limits itself to answering straightforward queries.
True Knowledge is currently in beta, with a full launch expected next year.
