

Search Engines, IBM's Watson, and Wolfram Alpha - taliesinb
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2011/01/jeopardy-ibm-and-wolframalpha/#more-791

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taliesinb
I performed the analysis comparing the performance of various search engines
on the corpus of past Jeopardy! questions, which is featured in the middle of
this blog post -- there is a supplementary Mathematica notebook for those who
want to know more. There's also a nice word cloud of Jeopardy answer types up
at [http://selfishmeme.posterous.com/comparing-search-engine-
per...](http://selfishmeme.posterous.com/comparing-search-engine-performance-
on-jeopar)

I thought this might be of interest to the H/N crowd, especially with all the
recent chatter of Google's diminishing search quality. This approach has the
advantage that it is a very wide and deep sampling of the world of possible
factual questions, and a reasonably objective measure of the ability of search
engines to strip out fluffy natural language to get at the heart of a search
and present possible answers on the first page of results.

Note the prominence of Yandex, the relatively unknown and recent Russian
entrant to the English search market.

