Can a new search engine upstart reign supreme?

NEWS A Californian start-up is planning to swipe corporate customers from Ask Jeeves in a battle of the natural language search engines. InQuira claims to have superior technology which gives 85 per cent accuracy on answers to questions posed by people using its system. It also claims its search engine can be maintained by just one member of staff compared with five or six for Ask Jeeves. InQuira is the result of a bumpy merger earlier this month between two software companies - Answerfriend and Electric Knowledge, which at the time had eight customers between them - and claims to be the Google of the corporate world.