Search engines play Trivial Pursuit
27 June 2005
Ask Jeeves, Answers.com, Google, Yahoo, and MSN can all play Trivial Pursuit, according to a report.
Associated Press writer Michael Liedtke asked the search engines real questions drawn from a Trivial Pursuit set, such as "What glass beads are created when a meteorite strikes the Earth's surface?"
The experiment suggested that Ask Jeeves and Answers.com were right about half the time, with the first link the engine supplied leading to a correct answer. Google was close behind the top two with a 40 per cent success rate, followed by Yahoo! and MSN trailing behind with 25 per cent and ten per cent respectively.
The journalist also discovered that the search engines fared better as he dug further into the results. He did not list all twenty questions he tested the engines with in his article, but said they rarely met the goal of providing a single clear answer to the Trivial Pursuit question.
Mr Liedtke also examined how often the engines completely failed to lead him to a page with the answer after he scanned three pages of search results and found that Ask Jeeves, Answers.com and Google all tied with a 15 per cent failure rate, followed by MSN and Yahoo! with a failure rate of 30 per cent.
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