For civil servants, going into purdah means that, while they may answer factual queries, they will keep public statements to a minimum.
Both devices can be asked to cue up music on Spotify and other services, set alarms and timers, and pose factual queries.
Yet that doesn't stop search engines such as Google from listing Wikipedia entries as the top search results for many factual queries.
She calmly responded to repetitive factual queries, even when the lines of questioning by Rachel Mitchell, the female prosecutor hired by Republicans to put a gentle, feminine sheen on their skepticism toward Ford, veered into the insulting and preposterous.
The Church of England was contacted repeatedly by The Economist with a simple request: to discuss with someone in the church how the course would be beneficial to its clergy, and to clarify factual queries about the course.
Ready reference might be too slight a term to cover some of these, but they were still mostly factual queries that could be answered if you knew the right obscure or standard reference work to consult.
One nice addition is Google's knowledge graph, which fetches info for lots of factual queries — who was the first person in space, what's the biggest breed of cat, etc.
This consideration would not be germane for factual information often queried about in surveys.
CRAIG KENWORTHY Bozeman, Mont., Aug. 27, 2007 If an article's accuracy or factual basis has been reliably queried or superseded, surely The Times has an ethical obligation to announce this fact prominently in the article itself (preferably at the top) and to link to the relevant follow-up, explanation, discussion or correction within the article itself.
Wolfram Alpha Not a search engine but a "computational knowledge engine", Wolfram Alpha can interpret queries and provide concrete factual answers rather than a list of search results.
