Factbites, an Answer Finding Search Engine

Get Answers with Factbites

What is Factbites?

Factbites, according to the home page, is an encyclopedia crossed with a search engine. Factbites endeavors to pull facts from web pages or online encyclopedias and presents them in your search results. The obvious glitch to this whole process is determining which is fact and which is fiction; however, I found that Factbites did a pretty good job of weeding out the dross.

Search the Web With Factbites

I decided to search for a somewhat vague concept first - love- which, in other more generalized search engines would bring back a pretty wild assortment of results. In Factbites, my results were more academically oriented. I received results from dictionaries, encyclopedias, universities, and many .org sites (typically non-profit organizations).

A more specific topic, what is insomnia, returned results in answer form; I was instantly able to see what the answer to my question was, rather than sorting through a whole bunch of results.

Factbites also returns Related Topics to the right of your main search results; for example, for my insomnia search, I had five related topics (one of which was "Insomnia is Good for You", strangely enough).

How Does Factbites Find Answers?

From the Why Use Us? page: "Factbites searches for matches on the basis of your whole topic area, not just your keyword. This means that it can return relevant, informative results on your topic that don't necessarily mention the word you searched for! The Factbites engine focuses on finding genuine, meaningful content. This makes it very good at filtering out spam sites. If the page doesn't have anything of substance to tell you, it won't rank well in a Factbites search."

Any complicated queries right now will not work in Factbites because they're still in beta. Many searches just will not work, for instance, if you put in more than a couple of keywords, Factbites doesn't quite know what to do with it and does not return the clean results that I mentioned above. My search for search engine algorithm didn't return very good results, for example.

Why Should I Use Factbites?

Factbites, right now, is a very good question and answer search engine ONLY if your queries are relatively simple. It's a good tool to use if you need a simple answer quickly.