I groaned when I saw that Brainboost “uses Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques” to answer questions written in plain English. But I found this “answer engine” to be very good. It successfully answered “which US presidents were assassinated”, “which UK prime ministers were assassinated”, and “who directed the Duck Hunt cartoon”.
It was not so clever on “who is Karen Blakeman”. Brainboost came up with some 3 year old information on a course I was running at the time in London, and ” Karen Blakeman is chairing the Concessions Committee, and will be needing LOTS of help here”. You bet I will! I know nothing about the Concesssions Committee – obviously another Karen Blakeman. The regular search results taken from a range of search tools fared better on the last one.
Worth a look and an interesting alternative answer/reference tool to answers.com.