I was alerted to this resource by Tara at ResearchBuzz. Answers.com has a new feature called Hoopoe, linked into Twitter. The idea is that you can send a tweet directed to @AnswersDotCom with a question. It will then reply with a bit of an answer, and a link through to their website with more information. I played around with it for a bit to see what it did.
I wasn't overly impressed really. I asked 'when did the civil war start?' with the answer being returned 1861. Well, yes. If I was referring to the American Civil War - though a more precise figure would have been appreciated, but what if I'd meant the English Civil War? My next question was 'what is Meatloaf's newest album called?' It wasn't able to work with that at all. My 'what is the population of London' resulted in 11,320,900, but I don't know what the source for that was, and how current the information is. I asked (as Tara did) 'What is the square root of 12?' and got "The square root of 217 is approximately 14.730919862656." Finally, I asked a question with the @AnswersDotCom in the middle of a tweet, and that was a no hoper.
It's a great idea, but not something that I'd use yet - there's a tremendous amount of work required yet. It'll happen, there's no doubt about that, and we'll see a lot of this happening in the future as search engines use Twitter as a search interface. But the service succeeds or fails on the data it has available, and on that alone, this service doesn't cut it. However - try it out yourself - see if you get better answers than I did - you don't need to follow the service, just tweet including @AnswersDotCom in the tweet, preferably at the beginning. Alternatively, use the hashtag #answersdotcom or #hoopoe but don't hold your breath!
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I wasn't overly impressed really. I asked 'when did the civil war start?' with the answer being returned 1861. Well, yes. If I was referring to the American Civil War - though a more precise figure would have been appreciated, but what if I'd meant the English Civil War? My next question was 'what is Meatloaf's newest album called?' It wasn't able to work with that at all. My 'what is the population of London' resulted in 11,320,900, but I don't know what the source for that was, and how current the information is. I asked (as Tara did) 'What is the square root of 12?' and got "The square root of 217 is approximately 14.730919862656." Finally, I asked a question with the @AnswersDotCom in the middle of a tweet, and that was a no hoper.
It's a great idea, but not something that I'd use yet - there's a tremendous amount of work required yet. It'll happen, there's no doubt about that, and we'll see a lot of this happening in the future as search engines use Twitter as a search interface. But the service succeeds or fails on the data it has available, and on that alone, this service doesn't cut it. However - try it out yourself - see if you get better answers than I did - you don't need to follow the service, just tweet including @AnswersDotCom in the tweet, preferably at the beginning. Alternatively, use the hashtag #answersdotcom or #hoopoe but don't hold your breath!
Thank you for the feedback, Phil! That is really helpful and as we work on the bugs apparent in this alpha feature, we are taking notes from everyone playing around with it.
Be in touch if there is anything else you wan to report - my email is lizc @ answers dot com.
Posted by: Liz | April 27, 2010 at 06:34 PM
Hello,
Just wanted to say that You are doing a great job here.
I myself am a Library and Information Science student. So long your blog has been a great inspirer. Hope it won't sound rude but it's strange and exciting both that You are so interested in newer communications.
Posted by: Vilija. Lithuania | April 30, 2010 at 04:31 PM