Plain Speaking

By ASHLEY DUNN

Oct. 19, 1998 12 AM PT

AltaVista, long considered one of the geekiest search engines on the Net, has launched a new plain-English method in an effort to expand its reach into the mainstream of Web surfers.

Instead of typing in bare keywords and Boolean search terms, such as “and” or “not,” users can blurt out their question as if they were talking to a reference librarian.

For example, “How many home runs did Roger Maris hit in his career?” returns a small group of similar questions that are linked to relevant Web sites, one of which has Maris’ career statistics.

The trickier question of “Who is the king of Siam?” brings up another group of questions that are linked to Web sites on Thailand, including one that lists the country’s kings and prime ministers.

This question-and-answer method of Web searching was developed by Ask Jeeves, a Berkeley company that has been working on plain-language queries since 1995. AltaVista is the company’s first major licensing agreement.

Ask Jeeves works by analyzing the words and structure of a question and then searching through a database to find an appropriate answer. The database now contains more than 6 million answers and is growing daily.

As with most other Web search tools, Ask Jeeves is capable of returning some incredibly strange responses, but its creators say it will get better as more questions and answers are loaded into its database.

Technology and the Internet

Ashley Dunn

Ashley Dunn is the former weekend editor at the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as assistant managing editor in charge of California news. Dunn joined The Times in 1986 as a suburban reporter in the San Gabriel Valley and later moved to the Metro section, where he participated in coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. After a stint at the New York Times, Dunn returned to Los Angeles in 1998 as a reporter and then editor in The Times’ Business section. He later was named to run science coverage. He worked as deputy national editor from 2007 to 2011 and played a central role in the coverage of some of the biggest national stories of recent years, including the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the 2008 election of President Obama. Prior to his career at The Times, Dunn worked at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, the Danbury News-Times in Connecticut and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Dunn is a California native who has worked as a dishwasher in Sacramento, a printer in San Francisco and a bicycle repairman in Walnut Creek. He has lived along the levees of the Sacramento Delta, the Powell-Hyde Street cable car line and the shaded streets of Pasadena. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in English.

Plain Speaking

More From the Los Angeles Times