As powerful as they may be, search engines can be time sinks - and sometimes "pathetically weak," according to a New York Times article - for anything other than simple keyword queries. And they certainly can't answer searches in question form, despite the current best efforts of Ask Jeeves and others, because they don't really understand the questions. That's where a government effort, the unclassified Aquaint project ("advanced question answering for intelligence") comes in. A joint effort by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and other federal intelligence organizations, the project deals with "question answering," or QA, a form of search that "understands" masses of information to provide a response. Yes, the project is yet another battle in the War against Terror.