Answers.com takes new, old approach to search

Is request a simple question and acquiring a simple answer too much to hope for from today's search engines? For the most part, it seems that way. But reply.com is trying to alteration that. The three-year-old search engine hopes to give reply to your natural language question that will keep you approach back.

reply.com claims to have "over four 1000000 answers...drawn from over 180 titles from brand-name publishers, master content created by reply.com's own column team, community-contributed articles from Wikipedia, and user-generated questions & reply from reply.com's industry-leading WikiAnswers." In truth, reply.com isn't so much a hunt engine as it is an info portal.

And under certain circumstances, this might be precisely what some searchers are look for. For illustration, the WikiAnswers site, mentioned above, has seen its daily page views go from 250,000 in early 2007, when it opened, to more than two 1000000 as of March 2008. It was expected to reach 11 1000000 monthly unique visitors in early June.

"People are going back to the reply format. They started that way, now they're going back to it," noted Henry M. Robert Formentin, vice president of ad sales at reply.com's parent company, reply Corp. This company should know how people used to hunt; it has a certain amount of history in this space. Reply Corp. Was founded in 1999, as GuruNet, and used to be available only through a subscription. Now it is wholly free to the user, supported by ad.

The site has so many tools and resources that it's difficult to do it justness in a simple review. For illustration, you can download 1-Click reply (for Windows only) from the site, and then use Alt-Click on any word in any programme to get a pop-up tool tip that gives you a concise answer shaping the word; clicking on a "Read more" button gives you more information. There's the inevitable toolbars, of course, and a version of Answers.com that is optimized for mobile devices. You can personalize your Google home page to include RSS feeds from Answers.com. And I'm far from done.

But here's the important question: does it deliver on its promise? Can I really just ask it a question and get an answer? If it doesn't, it hardly matters what else it can do, right? So let's roll up our sleeves and put it to the test.