As 2009 draws to a close, it seems a lot of people are asking True Knowledge when events have happened, and are looking to the future asking when some events will happen.
It all started with when do the clocks change a few weeks ago, but already some people are asking about the start of British summer time!
Of course Christmas is on people's minds and so we're seeing people wonder How long is it until Christmas? and asking which day of the week it will be. We're also helping people buy a christmas tree and the christmas tree decorations, and also a tree stand if they want one.
People are also keen to start planning 2010. We're seeing people ask about Easter in 2010, Good Friday, and the ever-important Easter Monday holiday.
Speaking of holidays, people are wondering when is Presidents day in 2010, the May bank holiday (known as Whitsun or Whit Monday) and even Thanksgiving in 2010! We've barely had the US 2009 Thanksgiving and our users are already keen on the next one.
Underlying Technology
The answers to the examples above hide quite a bit of cleverness our knowledge engine does. For example, Christmas is always on the 25th of December, and so asking When is Christmas? returns just the date without a year. However, asking When is Christmas in 2010? will give the full date including the year.
Other types of holidays are not fixed but fall on different days each year; Easter for example. Our knowledge engine recognizes this situation and thus asking When is Easter? will always return an answer with a full date that includes the year.
Yet another type of time-related question is completely dynamic questions, such as asking How long is it until Christmas? The answer to this question changes every second as we approach the actual day. Currently we return a nicely-formatted answer in years, months, and days as the answer warrants.
A nice variation is mapping dates back to holidays. Because True Knowledge has extensive knowledge about holidays around the world, we can answer questions about specific dates in a given geography. For example, Was January 2nd 2009 a holiday in Scotland?
Finally, there is another type of time-related questions we can answer: which day of the week a given date was, for example What day of the week was 25/1/77? Yes some people can mentally work the answer, but for the rest of us, True Knowledge can help.
Of course you can try these by asking us or querying our API time-related questions.
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