A Wikied Guru is Given
January 4th, 2005 by Adam Cuothe
Back from the holiday, I am.
And from DM Europe
GuruNet, a provider of online reference information, has launched Answers.com, a site-and-software combination providing reference answers rather than lists of search engine links
I tried GuruNet’s (now answer.com) desktop application a few years back. I remember the idea seemed fantastic… just click words anywhere on your desktop to do some research. Now you can do it by typing your question into the web site. It’s a bit like ask Jeeves (search in the form of a question), Yahoo (a taxonomy-ooooo), and Google (answers?), who all still wish they’d thought to call themselves Oracle before Oracle did. The web still hasn’t found its true wise man (or woman), just a wise nut. Seems GuruNet is selling results to Amazon’s A9, which causes one to continue wondering on volatility in the Google Toolbar –> Alexa (0wned by Amazon) web user stat collecting phenomenon.
GuruNet let me down in a few ways. First, its desktop app is a little gadget that has mostly been eclipsed by browser toolbars, integrated desktop search utilities, and if you’re running something like KDE on Linux, there’s an incredibly handy “dictionary” applet. Second, when I did a search for “a dogfaced stigma” it returned zero results. Why, guru, why? Must I seek a companion in Jeeves? Finally, while they get great kudos for properly making use of creative commons-licensed wikipedia content, that seems to be the bulk and most interesting of their content results. The rest of their information appears as a laundry list of reference content. I’d like to believe the GuruNet gurus will grow their results to be more useful than republishing already collected information. They should implement a system, which sorts and intelligently aids the user to find his/her research. Build in some sort of helpful weighing system to present the better responses in a more active format for the user. One idea would be to marry their system with something of the graphical search tool like kartoo.com.
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