Democracy Works By Keeping Everyday People Rural… (Lexxe Search Engine)

lexxe

One of the newer players to emerge on the search engine scene is Lexxe, billing itself as the “Natural Language Search Engine”. Ask it a question, and not only will it give you the links to relevant websites, but will attempt to understand and answer your question… ANY question.

You might have in your mind:

  • Thoughts of an almighty internet oracle.
  • An entity who would call upon the resources of billions of web-pages to solve the mysteries of the Universe.
  • Something that woudn’t just point me in the right direction, but give me the exact answers which I seek.

Well, I HAD those thoughts too, and while it’s getting there, it’s not quite up to mark yet. In any case Lexxe did have some interesting answers to some of my questions.

Before I go on, I’d like to point out that these answers are just derived from what’s out there on the web, and most likely have no bearing on Lexxe or any of it’s employees.

I started out with a few basic questions:

“What color is the sky?”
“A mixture of Ultramarine Blue and Cyan”
“Who is the prime minister of Britain?”
“Tony Blair”

Pretty accurate so far… let’s try being a little bit more philosophical…

“What is the purpose of life?”
“Entirely Non-mystical Solution To the Problem”
“What exactly is the problem which of you talk about?”
“Many”
“How does democracy work?”
“By keeping everyday people rural”

lexxe

As you can see, it does have some interesting ideas.

Going further down the road, it refused to give an opinion as to what color shirt I should wear today, and did not want to give any answer for everyone’s favourite two questions.

“If a tree falls down in a middle of a forest and no one is around to hear it, does make a sound?”
“How much wood would a wood chuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”

You can do similliar things with Yahoo Answers, and Google Answers, but you’ll have real people doing the answering instead, and of course takes a longer time to get the answer you want.

Bear in mind that this is a product still in Alpha testing mode, so kinks are expected to happen. Improvements are constantly being made to the answers and it will be interesting to see how they will take this to the next level.

Google may not tell you how democracy works, but then again “Democracy Works By Keeping Everyday People Rural” doesn’t seem very far away from what Google is currently practicing in China.

Related Links:

Lexxe
Google Answers
Yahoo Answers
Google censorchip in China

Bonus Answers to the two burning questions discussed in this post:

“How much wood would a wood chuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

“I’m not at liberty to answer that question, as the WCLU (Woodchuck Labor Union) has expressly forbidden any trade secrets such as this to be made available to the general public. Also, the amount of wood that is chucked by any single woodchuck is severely limited by the number of chuck-hours clocked by said woodchuck over a single pay period, not taking into account any overtime hours worked in areas with extreme abundances of wood to be chucked. “- via Yahoo! Answers

“If a tree falls down in a middle of a forest and no one is around to hear it, does make a sound?”

“This distinction between the sensorial and physical meaning of the sound gives a form to respond us to the old philosophical question: a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody hears it, was there sound. The answer is no, in terms of the sensorial ear and if in terms of the physical waves, the answer depends on how the sound is defined. The definition of sonorous waves covers three aspects: the origin, the means of propagation (in the longitudinal sonorous waveform), and its detector, that must be the ear).” - Via Think Quest (Translation: If no one hears it is is a vibration in the air, only when it is picked up by the ear, are those vibrations translated into sound.)

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    • 2 Responses to 'Democracy Works By Keeping Everyday People Rural… (Lexxe Search Engine)'

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    1. jafra said,

      on February 4th, 2006 at 6:57 am

      thank you for the information.
      Really impressive.
      results are very precises, an excellent engine for researchs.
      I will test later his abstraction capacities ;)
      I transmit.

    2. James Yeang said,

      on February 4th, 2006 at 11:33 am

      Bear in mind I just quoted a few interesting search results. The answers are far from correct in most cases. So far it works well where there is one single precise answer like “who invented something” or “how many stripes are there in this countries flag”. Asking it to more complicated matters result in potentially inaccurate answers. For example, “How do people celebrat chinese new year” netted me the answer “By making Tanagrams”. I suppose that may be what some people do, but making tanagrams aren’t what most chinese do during New Year :)

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