A new search engine service goes beyond what the big three of search — Google, Yahoo and MSN — has so far failed to do: provide answers right there on the screen. Search engines currently provide only a set of links, ranked by a particular combination of algorithms, to web sites that may (or may not have) the information to what you are searching for.

Answers.com, a new service launched by the Israeli company GuruNet, provide direct answers to search queries. It eliminates the process of clicking from one search result site to another, as the answer to your question is shown and neatly organized right in the results page. Answers.com uses a variety of sources for its results, often from dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Testing the service, I queried for “Thomas Hardy” and I was given the choice whether I was looking for Thomas Hardy the political reformer or Thomas Hardy the naval officer. Choosing the naval officer, I was then given texts from a dictionary, encyclopedia, lexicon, wikipedia, external link and best of the web (“some good Thomas Hardy” pages on the web). The cool thing was that everything was on one page – no need to go through 100s of links!

Check it out at http://www.answers.com