Brainboost
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brainboost is an metasearch engine designed to provide specific answers to questions asked in natural language. Currently it only supports English.
The Brainboost engine uses machine learning and natural language processing AI techniques to answer the questions.
Traditional engines return the links to the pages that appear most relevant. Additionally the results page may include a summary of the page. The user then needs to download the pages and read them to see if the answer to his question is in fact there.
Brainboost however works along the following steps:
- a user types in a question
- Using the question Brainboost generates a number of different queries that it submits to traditional "dumb" search engines
- Brainboost downloads top several hundred pages returned by the search engines
- It reads the pages, locates and isolates the answers in the text of these pages
- Brainboost ranks the different answers based on its AnswerRank algorithm and displays them to the user starting from the best ones
The engine is best suited to relatively common questions that might have been already discussed somewhere on the Web in one form or another. In some Brainboost may fail to produce an answer for a particular query, but for many questions the engine produces a number of great answers.
In December 2005, Brainboost was acquired by Answers Corporation.
