Tuesday, February 28, 2006
ResearchBuzz: Lexxe -- Natural Language Search Engine With Clusters:
"...Lexxe, a natural language search engine that also offers results in clusters. Lexxe is in alpha and available at http://www.lexxe.com/.
The front page has a query box and also some sample, Olympics-related questions that you can ask. I didn't choose any of the available ones, instead asking What is Skeleton?. Despite the fact that the word "skeleton" makes it a bit of trick question, Lexxe gave as its first result the Wikipedia entry for Skeleton-the-sport. There was also a dictionarylike "Answer" at the time that gave more traditional definitions of "Skeleton".
Clusters show up on the left. The clusters for this particular question include "Human Bones," "Olympic Sport", and "Anatomy". Unfortunately some of the clusters also looked fairly useless: ".Search", "Results", and "World's". A couple of them were cute ("Key" and "Closet".) Results include title, snippet, URL, and page size; click on a cluster and the search is rerun with the cluster words included. For example, Run What is Skeleton? then click on the Human Bones cluster, and the search will be rerun as What is Skeleton Human Bones. There is some goofiness going on with what words are included in the search; What is Skeleton? Human Bones Human Skeletal had more results than What is Skeleton? Human Bones. You can "drill down" through clusters, though Lexxe seems to get slower and slower as you do so. I got all the way to What is Skeleton? Human Bones Human Skeletal Anatomy Bone Yahoo and decided things were getting too weird.
I noticed that some of the Answers at the top of the page were not very useful. For one search result my answer was "skeletal system the following links will allow you to access real photographs of the human skeletal system" with no link. Just a sentence fragment.
I thought the results of Lexxe were pretty good. You have to be careful choosing your clusters, though, they vary a lot in quality. Further, drilling down more than one or two clusters deep doesn't seem to offer a lot of good."
"...Lexxe, a natural language search engine that also offers results in clusters. Lexxe is in alpha and available at http://www.lexxe.com/.
The front page has a query box and also some sample, Olympics-related questions that you can ask. I didn't choose any of the available ones, instead asking What is Skeleton?. Despite the fact that the word "skeleton" makes it a bit of trick question, Lexxe gave as its first result the Wikipedia entry for Skeleton-the-sport. There was also a dictionarylike "Answer" at the time that gave more traditional definitions of "Skeleton".
Clusters show up on the left. The clusters for this particular question include "Human Bones," "Olympic Sport", and "Anatomy". Unfortunately some of the clusters also looked fairly useless: ".Search", "Results", and "World's". A couple of them were cute ("Key" and "Closet".) Results include title, snippet, URL, and page size; click on a cluster and the search is rerun with the cluster words included. For example, Run What is Skeleton? then click on the Human Bones cluster, and the search will be rerun as What is Skeleton Human Bones. There is some goofiness going on with what words are included in the search; What is Skeleton? Human Bones Human Skeletal had more results than What is Skeleton? Human Bones. You can "drill down" through clusters, though Lexxe seems to get slower and slower as you do so. I got all the way to What is Skeleton? Human Bones Human Skeletal Anatomy Bone Yahoo and decided things were getting too weird.
I noticed that some of the Answers at the top of the page were not very useful. For one search result my answer was "skeletal system the following links will allow you to access real photographs of the human skeletal system" with no link. Just a sentence fragment.
I thought the results of Lexxe were pretty good. You have to be careful choosing your clusters, though, they vary a lot in quality. Further, drilling down more than one or two clusters deep doesn't seem to offer a lot of good."
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