Natural language Q&A engine True Knowledge hits 3m users and 300m facts

True Knowledge, the natural language search company, has announced a milestone today.

In the month of August, its site, where users get answers to questions asked in plain English, surpassed three million unique visitors, 26 times what it was a year ago, apparently. While its database has grown to 300 million facts or 31% in 2010. Many of those facts come from existing structured data, but users can also contribute their own.

Founded in 2005, True Knowledge’s goal is to provide a search experience where “users can access the world’s knowledge” by asking for the information they need using natural language, “as if they were talking to another human being”. The Cambridge, UK-based company, which is backed by Octopus Ventures, says that it’s able to achieve this because of its unique approach to structured and lexical knowledge.

Furthermore, those 300 million facts on objects, classes, attributes and relations, means that True Knowledge is able to “infer trillions of additional facts and provide direct, perfect responses to questions”, which directly impacts the end-user experience, says William Tunstall-Pedoe, Founder and CEO of True Knowledge, explaining the site’s growth.

On that note, True Knowledge’s traffic of more than three million was generated by Web and mobile users, with “none resulting from paid marketing”, says the company, which in the age of pay-per-click, is noteworthy in itself, I guess.