Well, it's always hard to say why something didn't work, but we certainly tried a very different user interface with our Izik UI, in which ambiguous queries got up to 200 answers organized into categories.
I'm curious as to how it failed. Did people use the site, and hate it? Did people join and then not return, or were those metrics unavailable? Were the operating costs abnormally high? Did the company receive a lot of users, but fail to receive enough revenue to cover even a normal amount of operating costs? Seems like one could narrow it down with the help of today's analytics tools.
I'm also curious if you have kept up with other web search technology efforts since then or whether you moved away to other things. There's definitely some things that don't add up.
