Technology Review reports on progress in Named Entity extraction research that will make search engines more powerful and closer to answering questions.
What is really interesting is that search engines started with only ‘string matching’ or key words but are slowly becoming more ‘semantically rich’ allowing people to start getting answers rather than just simple pointers to sources containing keywords.
I agree 100% on search engines finally showing us results we are actually looking for. I can’t tell you how many times I would look for an answer using a search engine and had to go to page 3 or 4 to find an answer. Now most of the time it is right on top of page 1! Thanks for the link to that research article!