Permutated Sentences
Before Google’s Q&A feature, a fun way to find instant facts was to
move around the words of a question sentence until you hit on an
answer. To explain, let’s say your question is “When was Albert Einstein
born?” We remove the first word, “when”. We’ll now do a search for
the several possible rearrangements of the words, and check the Google
page count for each:
• “Albert was Einstein born” (0 results)
• “born was Albert Einstein” (0 results)
• “Albert Einstein was born” (17,500 results)
• “Albert was born Einstein” (5 results)
... and so on.
The one phrase search of these returning the most results is our “fact
finder.” In this case it would almost certainly be “Albert Einstein was
born”, and the continuation of this sentence contains our answer. This
can be automated, but takes a while as going through all permutations
requires many Google searches. FindForward’s “Ask Question” search
(findforward.com/?t=answer) returns the following answer (you can see there
are some left-overs from the snippet which aren’t meaningful in this
context):
1879, Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879
German born American physicist who developed the
special and general theories of relativity.
