SEL: Kozoru Answer Engine Blocked From Google API

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December 21, 2005

Kozoru Answer Engine Blocked From Google API

Kozoru appeared on my radar at the beginning of December, when Battelle covered a blog post from John Flowers about the poor treatment he received from Google as he attempted to negotiate a sale of kozoru, his answer engine.

"Everything we saw and heard and felt seemed like we were getting along great with everyone there. Everything, that is, until three weeks ago when - without warning - they stopped responding to e-mails or returning phone calls. They did, however, take the opportunity to log into our private interface and see what we were doing (after we shared it with them), even after the calls stopped and the radio silence continued."

On the 19th Flowers reported in his blog that Google blocked his company's API usage.

From the appearance of things, Google blocked kozoru because it provides results in a more useful fashion: answers to natural-language questions. But who knows what's really going on behind the Google curtain...

update: Kozoru kindly wrote to correct my misspelling of its name.

Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

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