Ask Jeeves goes a step further because it uses its own index of websites and allows you to ask the question in plain English.
Ask Jeeves searches in Excite, Infoseek, Alta Vista, Webcrawler, and Yahoo and then combines these searches with a search in its own database of more than 7 million answers to questions in plain English. Jeeves first presents the results from its own database and subsequently the first ten items from the above-mentioned search robots.
More and more search engines are using the search method of answering the question you ask in plain english. At the moment, however, you cannot be sure which robot is being used and there is no possibility to use the "Advanced" options of every separate search robot when you use the Metasearch engines.
The concept of answering simple question in plain english is not so simple to execute for the programmers of the search engines. So check the rules of the metasearch engine you are using to see if they can answer your simple question or for advanced searching consider using their advanced search techniques or learn their rules for boolean searching.
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This file prepared and presented as an aid to help students understand the web. Send questions or comments to Royce Shook