SearchEngineWatch gibt im Artikel «Everything you need to know about natural language search» einen Einblick ins Thema der natürlichsprachigen Suche:
«Natural language search is search carried out in everyday language, phrasing questions as you would ask them if you were talking to someone. These queries can be typed into a search engine, spoken aloud with voice search, or posed as a question to a digital assistant like Siri or Cortana.
This is as opposed to keyword-based search, which is what most people who are used to using web search engines still default to. Keyword-based search is an attempt to break down a query into the most important terms, getting rid of unnecessary connecting words like “how”, “and”, “the”, and so on.
So if you wanted to know how high the Empire State Building was, a keyword-based search query for that information might be “Empire State Building height”. But if you were searching using natural language, you would phrase your query as, “How high is the Empire State Building?”»
Neben Google und Bing wird in diesem Zusammenhang u.a. die Suchmaschine START erwähnt:
«I also made an unexpected discovery when researching this article, which is that Ask Jeeves is not the only natural language question and answer service left over from the 90s. START is a “natural language question answering system” developed by the InfoLab Group at MIT, and it has been online since 1993.
START functions more like a reference book than a search engine, designed to give factual answers to questions in fields like geography, science, history and culture.
It also might be a little out of date. But it has an ability to puzzle out the different components of a complex query in a way that Google could stand to learn a thing or two from – and by the look of things, has been doing it for much longer than Google has.»