Google Answers was an online knowledge market offered by Google that allowed users to post bounties for well researched answers to their queries. Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher’s reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the Researcher’s fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100. In late November 2006, Google reported that it planned to permanently shut down the service, and it was fully closed to new activity by late December 2006, although its archives remain available.
[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_answers]
[Website http://answers.google.com/answers/]
Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven knowledge market website launched by Yahoo! on December 13, 2005 that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users. The site gives members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation and is based on Naver’s Knowledge iN. As of December 2006, it had 60 million users and 65 million answers. On June 11, 2007, Yahoo!’s former questions and answers service, Ask Yahoo!, was formally merged with Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers has become the second most popular Internet reference site after Wikipedia, according to Comscore.
[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers]
Fast Search & Transfer ASA (recursive acronym FAST) is a Norwegian company based in Oslo. FAST focuses on data search technologies. It also has offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries around the world. The company was founded in 1997.
On April 24, 2008, Microsoft closed its acquisition of FAST. FAST is now known as FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary.
FAST offers an enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provides a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offers a number of search-derivative applications, focused on specific search use cases, including publishing, market intelligence and mobile search. The Search Derivative Applications (SDA) are built upon the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). The company is developing PHAROS, a new European multimedia search engine. FAST is notable for a major ongoing investigation by the Norwegian police into accounting fraud around the inflation of revenues and profits which has led to police raids on its offices.
[Source Wikipedia ]
[Website http://www.fastsearch.com/]
ChaCha is a mobile answering service which uses a technique known as social searching (a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users).
[Website http://www.chacha.com/]
LeapFish is a search aggregator that retrieves results from other portals and search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Blogs, Videos etc…. It is a registered trademark of Dotnext Inc.
Leapfish is a type of metasearch site known as a search aggregator. Search aggregators compile and list the results taken from other search engines, in addition to providing their own content (generally in the form of advertising or result positioning based on internal algorithms.
In the case of LeapFish, the top results of any given search can be advertisements, where an individual or company can pay a registration fee to LeapFish to be positioned at the top of the result list in response to certain keyword searches.
[Surce Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfish]
[Website http://www.leapfish.com/]
Autonomy Corporation PLC is an enterprise software company with joint head quarters in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and San Francisco, USA. The company uses a combination of technologies borne out of research at the University of Cambridge . It develops a variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference (statistical inference in which evidence or observations are used to update or to newly infer the probability that a hypothesis may be true) in conjunction with traditional methods. In January 2009, it entered the Enterprise Content Management Space through its acquisition of Interwoven.
It has grown rapidly from a starup in 1996 and is currently listed on the London Stock Exchange. It is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index and is the UK’s largest software company by market cap.
[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomy_Corporation]
[Website http://www.autonomy.com/]
Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.
Powerset is working on building a natural language search engine that can find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword based search). For example, when confronted with a question of the form ‘which U.S. state has the highest income tax?’, conventional search engines ignore the question and instead do a search on the keywords ‘state, income and tax’. Powerset’s product, on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and then to search and return a subset of the web that contains the answer to the question. If it works, results from Powerset’s search engine would have a higher relevance than results from a keyword search engine. From a commercial standpoint, advertising on the results page could also be more relevant and could have a higher revenue potential than that of keyword search engines.
Currently, the company is in the process of “building a natural language search engine that reads and understands every sentence on the Web.” The company has licensed natural language technology from PARC, the former Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
On May 11, 2008, the company unveiled a tool for searching a fixed subset of Wikipedia using conversational phrases rather than keywords.
On July 1, 2008, Microsoft signed an agreement to acquire Powerset
[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company) ]
[Website http://www.powerset.com/]
Cuil (pronounced [ku?l], “cool“, according to the creators) is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008.
Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company raised $33 million from venture capital firms including Greylock.
[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil]
[Website http://www.cuil.com/]
