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Subjex

By Brian Proffitt

When I worked in a library while in high school, very few people would come up to me and tell me exactly what they needed. Instead of inquiring about "Jaws," by Peter Benchley, for instance, I would get something like "do you have that book about the shark?"

Such a broad question would invariably lead to a follow-up question by me: "you mean a shark in a movie?" If it were yes, then I knew what they meant. If it were no, then on to more questions.

This is the basic principle behind Subjex, a natural-language search engine developed by Subjex.com. Instead of tossing a few keywords into the search field and hoping for a meaningful response, visitors to the Subjex site can enter their question in a natural manner, complete with punctuation.

Results from the search question are displayed in a five-row format, with the next five results displayed on the next page, and so on. If Subjex has not located the topic you are looking for, you can ask another question, which will work with the first results to winnow out items that don't apply.

In this manner, Subjex learns about your search goals as you go. Ideally, after a few iterations of questions, you should have the exact Web page you need.

I tried about a half-dozen searches, and was able to get what I needed in each one. I liked the ease of use this search engine offered, since it helps you along the way by suggesting alternate searches.

The five-row-only results page seemed a bit limiting, since it forced me to scroll to a lot of new pages to see other results.

Subjex presumably displays results sorted by relavence, but without relavance markers, there was no way to tell. It also would be nice if Subjex listed the total number of results found, so I could see if I was getting close to something yet.

Response time was not the fastest I have ever seen, but I really could not categorize it as slow.

Subjex is an interesting way of dealing with complicated Internet searches with loose parameters, and I recommend checking it out for yourself.