Sarah Houghton (aka LibrarianInBlack) has blogged that Answers.com has a new natural language “Web Answers” feature which lets you pose life’s great unanswerables – e.g.:
(I should point out that Sarah didn’t pose that exact question, but it’s one that’s been niggling at the back of my mind for years!)
After reverse engineering the new feature, it looks like they’re using Ajax and XML – e.g.:
Some of you will already know that we’ve been using Answers.com on our OPAC to provide serendipity keyword suggestions, so I’ll have a go incorporating the “Web Answers” output into those suggestions too.