Lexxe is a natural language search engine of the answer search kind. This means that you enter questions, not search terms. And in addition to a list of search results that point you to webpages that might or might not provide an answer, Lexxe suggest a short answer to your question. Lexxe also clusters the search results.

The technology that powers Lexxe is based on the fact that search is a language-oriented, meaning-driven activity. When you do a search, Lexxe provides short, exact answers directly from webpages. The process is automatic and no human editors are involved. The answers come from unstructured texts and webpages on the Internet.

Pandia has taken Lexxe for a test drive.

Testing Lexxe

We tested Lexxe with the question “Who was Isaac Newton”. At top of the results page, we were provided with the answer “English mathematician and physicist”.

The search results are displayed below and they in most of our test searches they are quite relevant.

In the left margin Lexxe shows the search results sorted in clusters. These clusters are not always helpful, but in the case of Isaac Newton we get to choose among the following useful categories (in addition to some categories that were not equally useful):

• English Mathematician and Physicist
• First Modern Scientist
• Biography
• Philosopher
• Author

When we click on any of the clusters, the results of the refined search are also clustered, but these “secondary clusters” are seldom of any use.

On their website Lexxe claims that Lexxe is 50% more accurate and relevant, and 50% more efficient than other search engines. This is according to their own laboratory experiments. In our opinion the efficiency of Lexxe varies. It is quite good with simple questions that have a simple answer, but when the question has several possible answers, Lexxe might not find the answer you need.

Read more about the technology behind Lexxe.
Our favourite answer search service is still Answers.com.