Swingly’s Answer Engine Comes Out Of Stealth Swinging And Killing Zombies

An insane number of searches on the web involve people asking questions. Sometimes they're good questions, sometimes they're stupid questions, sometimes they're insane questions. Just start typing something into Google beginning with the words "How" or "Why" for proof of this -- the auto-suggest speaks for itself. Sadly, Google isn't great at answering questions because they're a search engine that mainly returns hyperlinks. Sure, your answer may reside on one of those pages, but that requires another click and some browsing. A new service launching out of stealth mode tonight, Swingly , wants to perfect this task. Of course, there are many other players in this space all of whom have tried to do the same thing or something similar. Answers.com, Ask.com, and more recently Aardvark (which Google acquired earlier this year), Facebook Answers, and Quora. Swingly says it has all of them beat because machine-drive Q+A services are too shallow while human-driven ones are too esoteric -- Swingly aims to take the best of both worlds. And so far, they've mined the web for over 100 billion question and answer pairings to link up.