For the most part, those who build these information oases have been happy to make their work freely available to the general public. Question: Is downshifting a good way to slow down my car? They tell me I should downshift when braking to slow my car down. Is this really a good idea? It used to be a very good idea, back in the days of medi... How often should I replace my brake fluid?

Deploying AI systems on the Web provides tangible evidence of the power and utility of AI techniques. Next time you encounter AI bashing, wouldn't it be satisfying to counter with a handful of well-chosen URLs? At the conference, Jude Shavlik asked me to edit a special issue of AI Magazine describing AI systems that have the Web as their domain. Indeed, the authors of each article included in this special issue have promised to create and maintain a URL pointing to a working prototype. Now, almost a year later, we have the fruit of this labor.

This article describes FAQ FINDER, a natural language question-answering system that uses files of frequently asked questions as its knowledge base. Unlike AI question-answering systems that focus on the generation of new answers, FAQ FINDER retrieves existing ones found in frequently asked question files. Unlike information-retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric of similarity between query and document, FAQ FINDER uses a semantic knowledge base (WORDNET) to improve its ability to match question and answer. We include results from an evaluation of the system's performance and show that a combination of semantic and statistical techniques works better than any single approach.