(SymbianOne Feature) If you've ever been into a pub argument over trivia ("No, it was the other guy who directed that movie"), you probably wished for an Internet connection along with Google to settle it. But even Google is more directed at searching for the right page as opposed to a direct answer. The right answer is often hidden deep within one of the several pages in the result list.

Introducing: The Find Engine

Now what would a "Find Engine" we need here consist of? It would directly answer a request. Then you could just cache this engine's front page onto your Symbian-OS hand phone. Next time, sitting on the pub stool, type in your request -- to read nothing but the straight answer.

How could such an answer engine be implemented? One way would be to develop an artificial intelligence bot that makes real sense of written human speech and allow it to spider the Web; or have a huge facts database with smart front-end query engine. Then again smart has always been complicated. Sometimes, easy works just as good. The most straight-forward algorithm to tackle our problem is to use glue phrases.

Glue Phrases

So what's a glue phrase? You just take a question and meld it into an answer by shifting words. Let's say the question is "Who is the director of Rocky?", then the answer would be "Rocky was directed by ...". The glue phrase here is _"was directed by"_ and sticks the subject in question to its answer. Now go ahead and enter the complete phrase "Rocky was directed by" into Google (including quotes). You'll find the answer right in the snippet provided on the result page. Of course you can do this for any movie title.

This is nice already, but the Google Web API makes it possible to take this approach one step further. Instead of relying on pure luck to return results for a single glue phrase (and our memory to _remember_ the right glue phrase), we can automatically go through different ones and compile the relevant quote from the result snippet into a larger text. So then we have: "was directed by", "was made in", "is", "has", "contains", and so on. Not just for movies, but for anything imaginable.

Even though results of using glue phrases in Google can be funny, they appear surprisingly well-informed and make for a pragmatic semantic web (while we're waiting for the real one to take off, that is).

I'm trying out concepts like glue phrases with my new search engine FindForward.com.

FindForward works great on my Nokia 6600, especially with Access NetFront browser (in my opinion the best browser available) -- because I can skip the searching.

About Philipp Lenssen

Philipp Lenssen lives in Germany and is Senior Developer for the websites for a popular sports car. He also writes a daily Google Blog which keeps track of current Google news, and also research into what is done, can be done, and should not be done with Google.

Web: www.FindForward.com