SEARCH ENGINES
"When you ask a question, you don't want to get 10 million answers," says Bruno Henry, CEO of LexiQuest, a linguistic software firm. "You want the 10 best answers."
Of course, Henry's company (www.lexiquest.com), which develops search tools that respond to conversational language instead of clunky Boolean strings, is hardly the only one giving simpler search engines lip service. But while the natural-language technology isn't new - AskJeeves has been using similar software since 1997 - LexiQuest's user base is. Henry has licensed the technology to corporate sites, like General Electric's, looking to become more customer-friendly. It's easier to type, say, "Where can I get my washer repaired?" than to drill down link by link to find that info.
Next up: developing natural-language translation software, letting people visit - and search - Web sites written in a language they don't speak. While such a product may be several years away, the market is already considerable: Nearly 96 million Internet users - 43 percent of the Net's population - speak a language other than English.
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