

Show HN: Natural Language Querying - drakaal
http://www.samuru.com/?q=why+are+gas+prices+so+high

======
shonuff
I think this is pretty incredible. Some of the questions I asked were;

Why is the sky blue? The sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue
light from the sun more than they scatter red light. 0. 4 years ago, according
to chacha.com

why are conspiracy theories so popular? Conspiracy theories are so popular
because they are unable to be proven false, and many people love to be in the
know, to have information that no one else has, according to popsci.com

why is obama popular? Mr. Obama is popular because he is a historic figure,
has an attractive personality, has passed key legislation, and receives
adoring press coverage, according to online.wsj.com

What didn't work :-( why is beer delicious Why is my poop green why is yawning
contagious

Cheers, keep up the good work.

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matiasb
Another interesting Q&A:

\- Why is marijuana ilegal?

\- Marijuana is illegal because it makes us think to much, the gov is trying
to make us think what they tell us and not think for our selves, according to
marijuana.com

------
greenyoda
Samuru says: "Kittens are cute because they're tiny fur-balls with smushed
faces, according to goodreads.com"

That's not a very satisfying answer; it's more like just a quote from one of
the references that their search engine found. If Samuru found a web site that
said "Kittens are cute because they have big floppy purple ears and eat
humans", would it know which one of these was a better answer (i.e., does it
have any idea what a "kitten" actually is)?

~~~
drakaal
We said "alpha" for this reason. You would agree that it answers the question?

What we have to work out next is trust and authority. But to do that we need
users to ask questions.

Honest, trying to think up questions to ask all day is hard.

And deciding who we trust and who we think is an idiot is hard. But the first
step is figuring out the candidates to judge.

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dleskov
A bit disappointed that I cannot yet add Samuru to the list of search engines
in FF. I switch between three engines multiple times each day.

By the way, will I be able to use it in place of Google Custom Search on my
own Web site?

~~~
drakaal
You can use it in place of Google. [https://www.mashape.com/stremor/stremor-
search-results](https://www.mashape.com/stremor/stremor-search-results)

The price is low enough that you should have no problem running adsense
against results to make back the cost and turn a profit.

Plus since we return Json you can do more styling to your liking. And we
return the Social Icon/Avatar, the OpenGraph Image, and you get a summary of
the page rather than a snippet, so I think you get a much better set of
features for your users.

~~~
dleskov
Sorry, "my own Web site" should have read "my company's Web site", with user
forum, product knowledge base, tutorials, articles, PDF documents, and the
like. Planting AdSense on it would be nonsense.

We used to pay $100/year for Google Custom Search. They had problems
processing our payment for this year's renewal, which they did not bother to
resolve, so I've been looking for alternatives.

~~~
drakaal
You can try it out.

put your companies name on the front of Samuru

[http://cnn.com.samuru.com](http://cnn.com.samuru.com) does cnn.com

If you want to search your company just put mycompany.com on the front.

That will let you see if you would like the results.

~~~
dleskov
It does not seem to work. This includes your cnn.com example. Your home page
is displayed instead.

~~~
drakaal
Should be working now.

[http://time.com.samuru.com/?q=test](http://time.com.samuru.com/?q=test)

[http://wired.com.samuru.com/?q=test](http://wired.com.samuru.com/?q=test)

~~~
dleskov
Ah, you did not mention the URL has to contain a query. I assumed that
mydomain.com.samuru.com would either display all mydomain.com pages you have
indexed, or otherwise indicate that I will be searching within mydomain.com.

------
matiasb
\- "Why is espionage important?" \- "Espionage is important because often
times having enough intelligence on different civilizations can keep random
bad things from happening, according to galciv1.com"

------
drakaal
Google released hummingbird, and it is cool for structured data, but what
about unstructured data? That's where [http://samuru.com](http://samuru.com)
is looking to change the way people search.

We read a tech crunch article that said humming bird was going to answer all
our questions using NLP. It didn't seem to do that, so we said, "let's take
the afternoon and put the ability to answer questions in to our search
engine."

We did that. Here is the slightly unpolished Alpha of the feature.

Ask some questions like: Why are kittens cute

Why are barns red

Why are gas prices so expensive

Should I buy a house

It won't answer everything, but it will answer a lot.

~~~
matiasb
"why is burger king bad?" "You know Burger King is bad because it is even
worse than McDonalds, according to yelp.com"

~~~
matiasb
I like the project, would be nice to see what can be done in the future!

~~~
drakaal
This is pretty early stage. Minimum viable product for a search engine is a
big task. Minimum viable product for a system that mines unstructured data is
even bigger. But I think we have a good start.

