IBM Almaden Research Center has developed a next-generation search technology, called WebFountain, that lets users ask specific questions in complete sentences — something today’s search engines have trouble handling.

WebFountain can whittle down billions of pages of unstructured data from the entire Web in real time, rapidly retrieving and analyzing only the most relevant pages. Geared for corporate applications, WebFountain spots online trends as they emerge, identifies patterns — assessing even word-of-mouth gossip, chatter and sentiment — and keeps track of them, noting how they change over time.