web searching

[cin0]

maybe I am missing something but i would think i could say alexa search the web for "blah blah" and get back some bing result of some sort. I do not understand how she chooses to search. you can say some statements and she will spit out a good answer that is obviously a web result and you can ask something else and she has no clue how to answer

how does it determine when or how to go get results? and besides wiki are there any skills I could add to help with a web search.

[DParker]

maybe I am missing something but i would think i could say alexa search the web for "blah blah" and get back some bing result of some sort. I do not understand how she chooses to search.

Think about the nature of general web search engines and how you use them.  The results you get from querying them is a set of hyperlinks, each accompanied by a snippet of text (or perhaps some graphics), to website pages that satisfy your search criteria.  You then use a mouse to click one or more of the links to display the content of those pages, which consist of some combination of text, graphics, audio, video, embedded application code, etc.  That's all great for use with the input/output capabilities of your PC/tablet/smartphone...but not so much a speech recognition/synthesis interface, which just doesn't lend itself to that sort of free-for-all rich content access.  So the Alexa service analyzes your information requests and consults an internal database of on-line information sources and chooses one (if it can) that it can use to satisfy your request via a strictly verbal response.

It's just not intended to be a general-purpose web search tool, nor can it be.

[cin0]

that makes sense the more i think about it the more i comprehend. it seems to answer what i will call encyclopedia info vs web searches. wonder if we could get a encyclopaedia britannica skill.... lol im sure it would only take a tiny database and not take hours to return results...

[mike27oct]

Everybody is different, right?  Same with Alexa and Siri.  Siri is smarter than Alexa, mostly because Siri has a "blackboard" to write on, too, and Alexa can only talk, as Parker said.  If I really want an answer I ask Siri, if I "hope" I get an answer, I will ask Alexa first.  And if I really, really, want an answer, I get on the computer and use Google.

[renegade600]

I did not get the echo just to ask it off the wall questions.  If I need an answer about something, the just a simple web search on the computer is the fastest.

That said, as I said in another forum, it would be nice to have it work like the computer of Babylon 5 when Marcus was doing a search to save Ivanovas life.  He did a general search, then did another search within the info the general search provided.  For it to work with the echo, it would require some sort of cache on the cloud that could hold the millions of possible results from the original search in order to narrow it down to what you are looking for.  Not sure if amazon or the echo cloud could handle it at this time.   

For you B5 fans, I would love to have the echo with the voice of Sparky...It would be interesting to have voice control with an attitude. 

[ScottinPollock]

how does it determine when or how to go get results? and besides wiki are there any skills I could add to help with a web search.

I love the Echo, but it has a LONG way to go before it will compete with Google voice search.

Check your home page when it seemingly fails. My experience is that it is usually because it did not hear you right. And too many times it simply won't (try getting info on Jerry Bruckheimer, where Google gets this right the first time).

[renegade600]

I'd like to have the option within the Echo app to choose Bing or Google as the preferred search engine. I think Google would give better results.

I hate bing.  I think google would give the best results too.

[ScottinPollock]

I'd like to have the option within the Echo app to choose Bing or Google.

I would too, but given Amazon and Google having demonstrated numerous times that they can't play nice together, I doubt that's gonna happen. While I'm thankful for the Google Calendar integration, I'd like to see so much more from my Google ecosphere referenced.

With that said, my problems with Alexa seem to be more about the speech recognition itself and not lack of search results.

And there's also the possibility that Google will enter this market eventually. They have way more back end smarts, including multi-language and contextual correction. One of the reasons I have only one Echo. (c;