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Powerset.com
A website that came to my attention a couple of months ago is www.powerset.com. This search engine has tried to make advances like I've just described. For example, when I search for "What year did World War II end?", it comes back with:
World War II: End date
September 2, 1945 (62 years ago)
Not bad. That's definitely an advance. What makes this especially impressive is that the search engine didn't suggest an article, but gave me the answer to my question directly as a value.
While this search engine is impressive, their implementation isn't very exhaustive. Other simple questions such as "How many feet are there in a yard?" don't return a specific value. As search engines continue to advance in the coming years, more and more of these questions will result in specific answers, and to push the boundaries, these search engines will need better language parsing and better internal representations of the world.
Here's a list of queries that Powerset was able to answer:
 | Ok: Bill Clinton's birthday |
| Fails: What is Bill Clinton's birthday? |
| Ok: What year was Bill Clinton born? |
| Ok: Bill Clinton's daughter |
| Ok: Who is Bill Clinton's daughter? |
| Fails: What is the name of Bill Clinton's daughter? |
| Ok: Who is Bill Clinton's wife? |
| Fails: Who was the first president of the United States? |
| Fails: First president of the United States |
| Fails: What year did man first go to the moon? |
| Ok: What is the capital city of Florida? |
| Ok: What is the capital city of Belgium? |
| Partial: Who invented the telephone? |
| Ok: What is the population of Mexico? |
| Fails: How many states are there in the United States? |
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