Enjoying your first visit

by Nick Franklin

This is the first in a series of posts we’ll be doing to help you get started with the True Knowledge beta site.

If you haven’t done so already I suggest signing up for an account, this will give you access to our main beta site where you can try out the True Knowledge Answer Engine.

Once you’ve activated your account and logged in you’ll be confronted with a page that looks a lot like a generic search engine’s homepage. However, the difference with True Knowledge is that you can get direct answers to direct questions.

There is no better way to get started using [true knowledge] than to try out some of our example questions. This will give you a feel for the type of things you can ask, e.g.

• What was the age of Queen Victoria on the 2nd of June 1859?
• How far is New York City from Paris in kilometres?
• Is Barack Obama older than Hillary Clinton?
• Who was president of the US when Barack Obama was a teenager?
• How long was Tony Blair the prime minister of the UK?
• How long is it until Christmas?
• What time is it at Google headquarters?
• (click here for more)

You may want to try altering some of these questions. For example you could change “What time is it at Google headquarters?” to “What time is it at the Statue of Liberty?”, or “is Barack Obama older than Hillary Clinton?” to “is John McCain older than Sean Connery?”.

Feel free to ask [true knowledge] anything you like; although the system can’t currently answer every question put to it, it does have the capacity, given the right knowledge, to answer almost anything.

In the next post in this series we’ll start on the basics of knowledge addition. Knowledge addition is a feature of the site that lets users teach [true knowledge] to answer new questions.