There are few things more satisfying than asking a search engine a question and immediately getting an answer. No weeding through Wikipedia entries. No sifting through spammy links. Just give me what I want to know.
For years sites like Ask.com and Google have offered this feature, but only for purely factual information - things like “What is the longest river on Earth?”. But try asking “How do I bait a fishhook”, and you’re left to fend for yourself.
Centrif, a new site that just launched in public beta, is looking to change this by offering a service that acts like a mix between a bookmarking service and an online reference guide.
Instead of indexing the internet, Centrif relies on user submissions to determine the best answers to each question. As they find informative pages across the web, users are invited to share their discoveries (along with the questions they answer) with others. Users can add pages to Centrif’s index using a bookmarket, a Firefox extension, or through the site itself.
Later on, users can ask questions at Centrif’s main site, which draws from these previously bookmarked pages. Questions that have been answered multiple times will have their links ranked according to their popularity, presumably allowing the most authoritative answers to rise to the top.
Unfortunately, the site still has some obvious shortcomings that severely handicap its utility. For one, the search will only find a match if every word in a query is included in a result’s description. A search for “What is James Bond’s favorite car” would not pull up a page that had been tagged “What is James Bond’s car?”, because the word “favorite” wouldn’t match. The site doesn’t have a synonym dictionary either, which makes searching even more difficult.
Beyond these search issues, Centrif simply doesn’t have many answers yet. The site is going to have serious trouble with the “chicken and the egg” problem - until it builds up a comprehensive database, few people will have a reason to use it. And it doesn’t have much to offer as a pure bookmarking tool either - there are plenty of mature competitors like delicious that have much more to offer.
Dead on arrival.
“But try asking “How do I bait a fishhook”, and you’re left to fend for yourself.”
http://www.centrif.net/?q=How+do+I+bait+a+fishhook
centrif.net/?q=%22How+do+I+bait+a+fishhook%22
I guess Google and Ask are in good company then.
I don’t get how the basic idea isn’t the same as Yahoo answers, which does a pretty good job answering those kinds of questions.
“There are few things more satisfying than asking a search engine a question and immediately getting an answer.”
This is a sad world we live in.
“There are few things more satisfying than asking a search engine a question and immediately getting an answer.”
You need a girlfriend.
@ImageCo
I have a girlfriend and I still like getting good results from a search engine. Different types of pleasure. Are you sure you have a girlfriend?
I don’t understand how this got out the door. Google and Yahoo are basically always up, and there are great bookmarking sites. What am I missing? You welcome innovative spins on existing technologies, but as I see it, it’s not here.
I agree with Michelle. Plus, as a user I just don’t understand how it works.
I think what Centrif is trying to develop is a Question Answering (QA) deductive-based query system. It looks like that their QA system is still primitive according to Jason Kincaid’s description of it. QA is regarded as the holy-grail of search which unifies symbolic-type (Natural Language) and numeric-type (Google, Microsoft, etc) search-methodologies. It is still in its infancy, and if the technology matures in the future, then finally computer will achieve the same capability depicted by HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Scary heh?
@Falafulu
You and Chris are scary…ahem.
I tried to look for a girlfriend, but Centrif had no answer:
http://www.centrif.net/?q=wher.....girlfriend
@Jason
Good article. I don’t understand why all these people don’t understand this product. It seems pretty straight forward to me. I think once they work out some kinks this could be a very useful tool.
@Niraj & Michelle
It’s different than Yahoo Answers because the answers that are given from Yahoo are from real people. The answers that are given from centrix are web pages that answer the question.
@Adam Loving
http://www.centrif.net/?q=translate+python+to+ruby
So this is another Q&A site, except that answers come from web pages instead of people?
That’s like http://www.onebigu.com, and basically most Q&A sites out there. People that answer questions often put links in their answers anyway.