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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Oh Please..

This sounds like it was written in 2007 or something.

Google has been working on question answering for years now, but only exposes it when it is sure of the answers.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=when+did+jfk+die

(I get a "one box" answer saying "November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy, Date of death"). You'll note that Google had to derive that I meant "John F Kennedy" by JFK, that I wanted a date, and then retrieve the answer.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=how+old+was+jfk+when+he+d...

"46 (1917–1963) John F. Kennedy, Age at death"

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=how+did+jfk+die

"Assassination John F. Kennedy, Cause of death"

It's worth clicking the "More info" button under one of these "One boxes". Google will tell you what it regards as "facts" and where it is deriving them from.

(Also, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+old+was+jfk+when+he... is just as impressive)

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> Google has been working on question answering for years now, but only exposes it when it is sure of the answers.

I find this only works for very particular, seemingly whitelisted, cases. For example, it does date of death well, but try to ask it the date of any other sort of historical event. It doesn't do the date of surrenders or famous battles, the day Columbus discovered America (it won't even tell me that date if I straight up search for "when is Columbus Day"). "When was the declaration of independence signed" gets me nada, and it can't tell me what year the Magna Carta was issued. It can tell me the day that Hitler died, but can't tell me when victory in Europe was declared. It can't even tell me when Enron went bankrupt, despite the first words in snippet under the first result for "when did enron go bankrupt" being "Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001"

I'm not picking and choosing examples here, everything that I tried besides birth and death dates did not work for me.

What Google is doing really seems like nothing but a parlor trick compared to what Watson can do. Maybe they really are doing all the same fancy math behind the scenes, but what is ultimately surfaced to me, the end user, is not impressive.

(Note that although I can't get coherent responses from Wolfram Alpha with natural language questions, Wolfram Alpha can answer most of these things if you don't ask it questions that way. "Battle of Hastings date"? Wolfram Alpha can do that, Google can't.)

I'm also continually surprised at how good google is at queries of the type "what was that that movie where the guy did that thing" and "what was that music group that has that gimmick".

Do you have an example? ( The two I tried did not work.)

In my particular case I watched a movie late one night and didn't know the name of it. Typed the following into google: "movie where a guy plays a vampire and house sits and (spoiler)" and the first result in my case, Body Double, is correct.

I have another example. I live in Mexico and I watch movies in Spanish/English depending on the channel. The titles are always in Spanish and a lot of times they don't translate clearly to English or they don't make any reference to the title in English. If I am watching a movie I usually try a few Google queries to find about the movie I am watching, to see if I like it or just to know the end. Even with out knowing the title I am usually able to quickly find about the movie even if it is not a blockbuster.

horror thriller where woman goes to russia meets brother

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475937/ - The Abandoned

^The result I was looking for appears first.^

I think it is ludicrous to think that Google can be displace from it position as the global leader of web search in the short or mid term. To displace Google a new search engine wouldn't just have to be better it would have to make Google appear like last century tech. With this said I have to make clear that I am no Google fan or Google hater but I am glad there are other search engines that can at least compete with Google on their national markets (Yandex, Baidu, Naver, Seznam & Yahoo Japan).

"That movie with the living car" came close for me the other day, giving me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine instead of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_(1983_film)

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