"A mild-mannered British physicist is trying to render Google irrelevant. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, a grandiosely ambitious piece of software, has come up with Wolfram Alpha, a grandiosely ambitious engine of knowledge.
Grandiosely ambitious, and grandiosely inexplicable. Put simply, Wolfram Alpha, due to launch in May, will "compute" answers to questions, where Google and other search engines merely trawl the Web for pages which might hold the answer.
To do this, Wolfram has had a small army of researchers working on systematically analyzing and structuring the corpus of human knowledge so that a computer might be able to answer questions with concrete answers, such as, "How far will the Earth be from the Sun tomorrow?", a question Google completely fails to answer."
Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing if the creator of Mathematica can produce an algorithm that searches the web better than Google, and maybe even threaten to overtake Google's user base. Although I honestly don't expect much, most software on launch date are underwhelming and filled with bugs, and not to mention that it will probably take more than just a better algorithm to dethrone Google (e.g. publicity). But nonetheless, I'm definitely going to give it a shot when it comes out in May 2009.
But I assume most people use key terms to find stuff through google (for example, "terran emperor boxer pimpest play" or something like that) and not type in question sentences like "What is the pimpest play executed by the Terran Emperor SlayerS_'BoxeR'?"
I hope google dies...im really getting tired of hearing "google it" i hate that ppl go with whatever is newer...even if it isnt better. This thing seems like an awesome tool though
The only thing that I see beating Google would be something like Yahoo Answers, but in search engine form... So you would type in an actual question and just receive the actual answer instantaneously, which I guess is what is described in the article.
I think the whole search engine industry is heading toward this trend anyway, so it'll be interesting to see who comes up on top first
On April 10 2009 14:04 EvilTeletubby wrote: So... this is basically like Ask Geeves; useful for retards that don't know how to properly use a search engine?
Well, I think it's all about efficiency. If you get faster and more accurate answers on average with one search engine, why use the other?
On April 10 2009 14:04 EvilTeletubby wrote: So... this is basically like Ask Geeves; useful for retards that don't know how to properly use a search engine?
Well, I think it's all about efficiency. If you get faster and more accurate answers on average with one search engine, why use the other?
Depends. If you're looking for a common answer, I'm sure this thing will be great. Then again, if you're looking for a common answer and know how to use a search engine properly, I'm pretty convinced you'd find it just as easily.
bet you never heard of any of them either (to be fair, some of those are actually good. cuil was made by ex-googlers for example, is really fast and gives great results. plus it has that whole slickness going for it, just like google. but you still haven't heard of it.)
Google killer is an exaggeration and a half, and I'm going to assume the person who dubbed it such knows this.
Google is so much more than a search engine now. It provides literally hundreds of incredibly useful services, ranging from collaboration tools to website statistics analysis. Yes, the search engine is what they are known for and still their largest asset imo (You could argue that their advertising services are, however I'd say that their advertising platform would be lessened significantly if they lost the market share they have for internet search), but this service described in the OP, answering questions, is probably about 1/4 of the reason I use google search. I use it largely to find websites about certain topics, usually to interact with the communities. Asking for an answer to a question doesn't cover that. Obviously there is probably a significant amount of people (probably even the majority of searchers) who would prefer to search in question form, but my point isn't that it isn't useful, rather that it doesn't cover half of what it could.
All that aside, I like the idea and I hope it works well. I just think Google is too big to be 'killed' by another, possibly more powerful, search engine, especially when its another one of the 'ask a question and we'll give you a direct answer' search engines, as this seems to be.
On April 10 2009 14:01 konadora wrote: Wow, better than Google? Awesome.
But I assume most people use key terms to find stuff through google (for example, "terran emperor boxer pimpest play" or something like that) and not type in question sentences like "What is the pimpest play executed by the Terran Emperor SlayerS_'BoxeR'?"
There are quite a few search engines that will give better results then google can but none is quite as popular as google
On April 10 2009 14:04 EvilTeletubby wrote: So... this is basically like Ask Geeves; useful for retards that don't know how to properly use a search engine?
Well, I think it's all about efficiency. If you get faster and more accurate answers on average with one search engine, why use the other?
Depends. If you're looking for a common answer, I'm sure this thing will be great. Then again, if you're looking for a common answer and know how to use a search engine properly, I'm pretty convinced you'd find it just as easily.
I guess I'm just trying to find the "Why" here.
It's just that as time goes on people will get more and more lazy and will want an immediate answer to whatever questions they have. If it's easier and more convenient for people to use it, then why not go after that market? And a lot of people don't really know how to use a search engine properly, or how keywords actually work. And also, Google's system has a lot of flaws as well.
I think eventually, all search engines/computers will think more like humans.
On April 10 2009 14:04 EvilTeletubby wrote: So... this is basically like Ask Geeves; useful for retards that don't know how to properly use a search engine?
Well, I think it's all about efficiency. If you get faster and more accurate answers on average with one search engine, why use the other?
Depends. If you're looking for a common answer, I'm sure this thing will be great. Then again, if you're looking for a common answer and know how to use a search engine properly, I'm pretty convinced you'd find it just as easily.
I guess I'm just trying to find the "Why" here.
Currently, a lot of peoples' choice of search engine boils down to simply popularity or the general trend. That's because they all basically do the same thing. I remember back in the day when I was using Altavista to search on the internetz, and I really couldn't decide which search engine was better between Google and them. But finally, I saw that Google was pulling away and because Google was basically the same as Altavista except with a slightly different web crawling algorithm, I guess I jumped on the Google bandwagon as well.
But if Wolfram is really doing something innovative here with the way that they search with algorithms, then maybe that's the answer to your question of "Why" people might want to switch.
Having read the full article now, I get the feeling that this isn't a search engine as we understand the term, rather it's supposed to be a compilation of all human knowledge that can be 'asked' for direct answers.
On April 10 2009 14:24 Bockit wrote: Having read the full article now, I get the feeling that this isn't a search engine as we understand the term, rather it's supposed to be a compilation of all human knowledge that can be 'asked' for direct answers.
I think.
It seems like they are finding a new way to search for terms using the english language, so rather than relying on a specific combination of words to find your search result, they are working on a way to "explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable."
This implies that its main advantage is that it would be useful for finding answers to questions. However, I'm assuming that if you simply type in "teamliquid" into their search engine, it would come up with google-like results, which is basically all that you can expect. Oh well, we'll see when it comes out.
bet you never heard of any of them either (to be fair, some of those are actually good. cuil was made by ex-googlers for example, is really fast and gives great results. plus it has that whole slickness going for it, just like google. but you still haven't heard of it.)
I tested cuil many times starting on its release date. It sucked back then and couldn't even return itself when you typed in "cuil". It is better now but still not as good as google for most types of searches.
On April 10 2009 14:04 EvilTeletubby wrote: So... this is basically like Ask Geeves; useful for retards that don't know how to properly use a search engine?
WORD i see people type shit into search engines like:
On April 10 2009 14:24 Bockit wrote: Having read the full article now, I get the feeling that this isn't a search engine as we understand the term, rather it's supposed to be a compilation of all human knowledge that can be 'asked' for direct answers.
I think.
here's a better answer than my previous reply:
"I agree with Wolfram, that bias in the data choices will not be a problem, at least for a while. But even scientists don’t always agree on the answers to factual questions, or what models to use to describe the world — and this disagreement is essential to progress in science in fact. If there is only one “right” answer to any question there could never be progress, or even different points of view. Fortunately, Wolfram is desigining his system to link to alternative questions and answers at least, and even to sources for more information about the answers (such as the Wikipeda for example). In this way he can provide unambiguous factual answers, yet also connect to more information and points of view about them at the same time. This is important."
I think that even though the switching costs between search engines is low, the google search is "good enough", and will have people continue to go back to google. What would it take for users to change their behavior and switch away from google? that's the question that microsoft has been trying to answer for years now, and they still haven't been able to come up with anything.
Microsoft and google both have a bunch of smart people working for them - I doubt that he'll be able to come up with anything groundbreaking enough to improve on search directly.
This is of course, ignoring the other competitive advantages that google and microsoft have, such as deeper pockets, better infrastructure, etc.
bet you never heard of any of them either (to be fair, some of those are actually good. cuil was made by ex-googlers for example, is really fast and gives great results. plus it has that whole slickness going for it, just like google. but you still haven't heard of it.)
I tested cuil many times starting on its release date. It sucked back then and couldn't even return itself when you typed in "cuil". It is better now but still not as good as google for most types of searches.
yes it wasn't good when it was released. few things are. google wasn't either
anyway i (like everyone) use google mainly.. i only use cuil when google fails me (which it does, sometimes). it has its uses
if it keeps getting better though, i might switch, but google's built-in filters are so great. cuil's working on something similar too though, so we'll see
bet you never heard of any of them either (to be fair, some of those are actually good. cuil was made by ex-googlers for example, is really fast and gives great results. plus it has that whole slickness going for it, just like google. but you still haven't heard of it.)
I tested cuil many times starting on its release date. It sucked back then and couldn't even return itself when you typed in "cuil". It is better now but still not as good as google for most types of searches.
yes it wasn't good when it was released. few things are. google wasn't either
anyway i (like everyone) use google mainly.. i only use cuil when google fails me (which it does, sometimes). it has its uses
if it keeps getting better though, i might switch, but google's built-in filters are so great. cuil's working on something similar too though, so we'll see
I just typed in a search for "inches to mm" in cuil.com to see if it would give me a conversion, but the most I got from the first page was a wikipedia article on 35mm film, one site that went down, and another that got blocked by noscript...
On April 10 2009 15:11 travis wrote: I hate to be a pessimist but this sounds like a bad idea.
also I don't see how this is a google killer, google is a search engine. it finds web pages. all this does is answer questions?
also how exactly is this going to figure out if an answer is right or not based on math? that makes no sense.
I wouldn't say that it's a bad idea, i think it will link you to relevant information even if your question doesn't have a definite answer. However, I do agree with you that it is different than google, because its purpose isn't to only search for random strings that you type in.
also how exactly is this going to figure out if an answer is right or not based on math? that makes no sense.
I don't see how this would end up killing Google as a search engine. So what if it could possibly spit out the answer to some question, people don't use Google just for questions.
If this were to accurately answer most direct questions, I could see myself using it ALONGSIDE Google. Google is a search engine used for finding websites, not just for answering questions.
i'm excited because mathematica is awesome, and there's a lot of potential here
but it's impossible to judge how effective this is going to just by reading the methodology. if the algorithms are really good, then they could truly be on to something
(unlike cuil, which you could tell was going to suck majorly just by reading how it worked)
^^ LOL but google wasnt made to be something that answered. its just a engine that links a lotta websites through revelevancy... it was a project for a Master's degree..
On April 10 2009 14:14 Bockit wrote: Google killer is an exaggeration and a half, and I'm going to assume the person who dubbed it such knows this.
Google is so much more than a search engine now. It provides literally hundreds of incredibly useful services, ranging from collaboration tools to website statistics analysis. Yes, the search engine is what they are known for and still their largest asset imo (You could argue that their advertising services are, however I'd say that their advertising platform would be lessened significantly if they lost the market share they have for internet search), but this service described in the OP, answering questions, is probably about 1/4 of the reason I use google search. I use it largely to find websites about certain topics, usually to interact with the communities. Asking for an answer to a question doesn't cover that. Obviously there is probably a significant amount of people (probably even the majority of searchers) who would prefer to search in question form, but my point isn't that it isn't useful, rather that it doesn't cover half of what it could.
All that aside, I like the idea and I hope it works well. I just think Google is too big to be 'killed' by another, possibly more powerful, search engine, especially when its another one of the 'ask a question and we'll give you a direct answer' search engines, as this seems to be.
This is your answer, folks. There's so much more that google offers than just web search (even if I prefer yahoo ;x)
If google sees it as a competitor they could just remove it from their search engine... who the hell would find something called Wolfram without being able to google it?
On April 10 2009 14:04 EvilTeletubby wrote: So... this is basically like Ask Geeves; useful for retards that don't know how to properly use a search engine?
Well, I think it's all about efficiency. If you get faster and more accurate answers on average with one search engine, why use the other?
Depends. If you're looking for a common answer, I'm sure this thing will be great. Then again, if you're looking for a common answer and know how to use a search engine properly, I'm pretty convinced you'd find it just as easily.
On April 10 2009 14:14 Bockit wrote: Google killer is an exaggeration and a half, and I'm going to assume the person who dubbed it such knows this.
Google is so much more than a search engine now. It provides literally hundreds of incredibly useful services, ranging from collaboration tools to website statistics analysis. Yes, the search engine is what they are known for and still their largest asset imo (You could argue that their advertising services are, however I'd say that their advertising platform would be lessened significantly if they lost the market share they have for internet search), but this service described in the OP, answering questions, is probably about 1/4 of the reason I use google search. I use it largely to find websites about certain topics, usually to interact with the communities. Asking for an answer to a question doesn't cover that. Obviously there is probably a significant amount of people (probably even the majority of searchers) who would prefer to search in question form, but my point isn't that it isn't useful, rather that it doesn't cover half of what it could.
All that aside, I like the idea and I hope it works well. I just think Google is too big to be 'killed' by another, possibly more powerful, search engine, especially when its another one of the 'ask a question and we'll give you a direct answer' search engines, as this seems to be.
This is your answer, folks. There's so much more that google offers than just web search (even if I prefer yahoo ;x)
On April 10 2009 14:14 Bockit wrote: Google killer is an exaggeration and a half, and I'm going to assume the person who dubbed it such knows this.
Google is so much more than a search engine now. It provides literally hundreds of incredibly useful services, ranging from collaboration tools to website statistics analysis. Yes, the search engine is what they are known for and still their largest asset imo (You could argue that their advertising services are, however I'd say that their advertising platform would be lessened significantly if they lost the market share they have for internet search), but this service described in the OP, answering questions, is probably about 1/4 of the reason I use google search. I use it largely to find websites about certain topics, usually to interact with the communities. Asking for an answer to a question doesn't cover that. Obviously there is probably a significant amount of people (probably even the majority of searchers) who would prefer to search in question form, but my point isn't that it isn't useful, rather that it doesn't cover half of what it could.
All that aside, I like the idea and I hope it works well. I just think Google is too big to be 'killed' by another, possibly more powerful, search engine, especially when its another one of the 'ask a question and we'll give you a direct answer' search engines, as this seems to be.
This is your answer, folks. There's so much more that google offers than just web search (even if I prefer yahoo ;x)
I just think Google is too big to be 'killed' by another, possibly more powerful, search engine, especially when its another one of the 'ask a question and we'll give you a direct answer' search engines, as this seems to be.
Now, I could be wrong, but I think Google, as with most other search engines is syntactically based (though I hear Altavista gives you a bit more freedom in this regard). So, if you type a query into Google, your answer will be based on whether a site happens to have those words in some fashion or another. For exampls, type "difference in height between sears tower and white house" into Google. You won't get an aswer; rather, you will get various sites that may individually have the height of the Sears Tower or that of the White House (at least I didn't notice any with the answer when I did a quick check just now). Clearly though, you could extract the answer from the results that were found, but the fact remains that Google had no idea how to, because it has no concept of what the words meant. Now this example is very simple; you could just go get the heights and take their difference, but let's say you have a different matter, such as "what is a rough probability that (blah) event was an instance of (blah)", Google will again fail miserably in almost all of the cases unless by miraculous chance a website happens to have exactly that information there in that syntax or something similar, rather than having the information spread out over various sites.
Now what makes Wolfram Alpha seem different, at least from Wolfram's blog (http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/) is that Wolfram Alpha appears to be a semantically oriented engine. That is, it has some semblance of language; it doesn't necessarily "know" what a word means, whatever "know" actually means (how do you "know" a word anyways), but it knows the relations that word has to other things. Now Wolfram didn't specify exactly what methods were used, but one possible method is using nth order predicate calculus with a large database, arranged so that the number of relations are minimized. By minimized I mean that say you wanted to know whether one bird was another. Well, you could make 99990000 data pairings between 10000 birds with a true or false, or you could give each of the 10000 birds its proper name under the usual classification system, and have a rule saying if the names are the same, then the birds are the same, and if not, assume they are not; thus you have gone from 99990000 to 10001. Fromt hen on, if you want to ask it whether this random bird with some random official name is the same as another bird with a common name, Google might not be able to give you an answer, but Wolfram Alpha would, after it has crawled the web to increase its knowledge base; note the next part;
From the Wolfram blog:
But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding.
All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do.
Of course, even that has never been done in any generality. And it’s made more difficult by the fact that one doesn’t just want to handle a language like English: one also wants to be able to handle all the shorthand notations that people in every possible field use.
It seems that Woflram Alpha was made to convert from Human Language A -> Alpha Language -> Human Language X -> Alpha Language -> Language A (Repeat) perfectly fine. Thus Woflram Alpha could reasonably get "smarter" by crawling the web, getting new base data entires into its database; the results would get better and better over time, depending on its exact heuristics, possibly to the point where it would be as good and then better than any person who had all the data on the web in their head and could retrieve incredibly fast. And don't say you wouldn't have a use for such a person.
Certainly you have to have a way to deal with false positives, which may involve a certain probabilistic scheme asking users questions to check its knowledge base, and asking further questions created to make sure the user isn't consistently bsing it, but who knows what exactly Wolfram Alpha is up to =)
So no, I don't think this is "another one of the 'ask a question and we'll give you a direct answer'" type of search engine, at least not from what Wolfram is saying, and that makes it exiciting.
I use it largely to find websites about certain topics, usually to interact with the communities. Asking for an answer to a question doesn't cover that.
Sure it can. Even if you want to force every query into a question, you can always type "Best website for Starcraft Programing?", or "Best website from which I can learn Prolog and its related mathematical structures?", to which Woflram Alpha's knowledge base and thus (hopefully) accuracy should grow as it experiences more sites.
All that said, I don't know if this would be a Google Killer. From what I gather, Google makes most of its money from placing sites on websites. Now, Woflram Alpha might be able to find sites better, but Google's ad placement service could just take those results into account. Turning a knowledge engine into a smart ad placement engine would probably require adding more parts to Woflram Alpha, and I'm not sure how that would be carried out, but somehow I don't think that's the point of the project, which, as Wolfram says,
And—like Mathematica, or NKS—the project will never be finished.
I for one am eagerly awaiting getting in to the alpha testing =)
Most asked questions of all time: Is Obama is Muslim? Does Iraq have weapons of mass destruction?
You know whats weird? I just received an email about a Mathematica presentation...
April 10, 2009
To: UCSC Faculty and Students From: Information Technology Services (ITS)
RE: Mathematica Software Technical Talk - Friday April 17, 10AM to 11:30AM, E2 Simularium at UCSC
You are invited to join Mathematica representative, Craig Bauling at the E2 Simularium at UCSC on Friday, April 17, starting at 10AM as he guides us through the capabilities of Mathematica. Craig will demonstrate the key features that are directly applicable for use in teaching at UCSC.
Topics of this technical talk include:
* 2D and 3D information visualization * Creating interactive models that encourage student participation and learning * Practical applications in Economics, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, and Mathematics * On-demand Chemical, Economic and Social data * Mathematica as a modern programming language * Symbolic interface construction
Prior knowledge of Mathematica is not required - new users are encouraged to attend. Current users will benefit from seeing the many improvements and new features of Mathematica 7. http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/newin7
This is a great opportunity for all faculty and students to learn more about Mathematica. We hope to see you there!
If you have any questions, please contact Hilary Hamm, Information Technology Services, at 459-5405 or email hahamm@ucsc.edu.
Google has not only taken over the internet search market it has infiltrated the english language as a verb. Even if you aren't using google one can always be sure to say "I'm googling it" , or "just google it" . You can't overtake that.
On April 11 2009 08:59 CharlieMurphy wrote: Google has not only taken over the internet search market it has infiltrated the english language as a verb. Even if you aren't using google one can always be sure to say "I'm googling it" , or "just google it" . You can't overtake that.
I dunno, see what happened to IE after it had 95% of the world browser share for so long, granted the absolute volume was not as large. But in general, even the biggest companies and brands have shown through time that they can be defeated..
On April 11 2009 08:44 EtherealDeath wrote: Sure it can. Even if you want to force every query into a question, you can always type "Best website for Starcraft Programing?", or "Best website from which I can learn Prolog and its related mathematical structures?", to which Woflram Alpha's knowledge base and thus (hopefully) accuracy should grow as it experiences more sites.
Exactly! Almost anything you could ever want to know can be phrased into a question. I guess the question is if it will work for all questions. For example, if you wanted to search for a random string like "lolcats monorail," then you could simply ask: "Which websites contain are most relevant to the words 'lolcats' and 'monorail' ?" This would either force Wolfram Alpha to act like google, or it might completely misinterpret the question by looking for a factual answer and give you the average number of cats located in subway stations or something.
From what I know about the website, even if there isn't a factual answer to that question, it will still bring up results relating to your inquires. That implies that it will at least act like google to a certain extent.
On April 10 2009 14:02 iSCOUT4u wrote: I hope google dies...im really getting tired of hearing "google it" i hate that ppl go with whatever is newer...even if it isnt better. This thing seems like an awesome tool though
On April 11 2009 08:59 CharlieMurphy wrote: Google has not only taken over the internet search market it has infiltrated the english language as a verb. Even if you aren't using google one can always be sure to say "I'm googling it" , or "just google it" . You can't overtake that.
I dunno, see what happened to IE after it had 95% of the world browser share for so long, granted the absolute volume was not as large. But in general, even the biggest companies and brands have shown through time that they can be defeated..
IE has a lot of shall we say... glaring issues that allowed another company to develop something better.
Google is fairly comprehensive and unlike IE it doesn't suck.
Google's massive data mining and recording of user activity pretty much ensures that there can't ever be a "Google killer"... whenever you use Google you'll get the "best" or "most relevant" results (for you) in the top 5 results, often even the very top result is indeed the best one. No other search engine can accomplish that.
I've also read once that they put *a lot* of thought and research into their site layout respectively how fast and easy the user can find what he needs. The layout of the search result page is pretty much perfect.
You know whats really crazy? Two years ago I sent an email to both Google and Wolfram Research telling them that you should be able to enter mathematica commands into the google search bar. My argument is that it would be good for everyone for a number of reasons which I laid out.
I later got an email from someone at Wolfram telling me that we'd have a lot more to discuss if it they could talk. Well it turns out thats the approximate time they started this project.
On April 12 2009 16:47 fight_or_flight wrote: You know whats really crazy? Two years ago I sent an email to both Google and Wolfram Research telling them that you should be able to enter mathematica commands into the google search bar. My argument is that it would be good for everyone for a number of reasons which I laid out.
I later got an email from someone at Wolfram telling me that we'd have a lot more to discuss if it they could talk. Well it turns out thats the approximate time they started this project.
if wolfram kills google, im holding you responsible.
On April 12 2009 16:47 fight_or_flight wrote: You know whats really crazy? Two years ago I sent an email to both Google and Wolfram Research telling them that you should be able to enter mathematica commands into the google search bar. My argument is that it would be good for everyone for a number of reasons which I laid out.
I later got an email from someone at Wolfram telling me that we'd have a lot more to discuss if it they could talk. Well it turns out thats the approximate time they started this project.
Sorry, it's hard to beat fully customizable and very useful homepage like that. Google ain't gonna die anytime soon.
but you could just as easily have all of those items avaliable on your desktop without using google. google isn't going to die anytime soon but not for this reason. also, igoogle sucks. use the firefox keyword feature ("g Teamliquid" to google TL, "w Ongamenet" to wiki Ongamenet, etc etc).
Haven't tried chrome yet. Tried Sketchup though. That thing was amusing.
I don't want all this stuff on my desktop (and I'd have to use google toolbar for that since I'm on XP) as I hate widgets and too much stuff on my screen. All this info is useful for me, but not all the time.
On April 11 2009 08:59 CharlieMurphy wrote: Google has not only taken over the internet search market it has infiltrated the english language as a verb. Even if you aren't using google one can always be sure to say "I'm googling it" , or "just google it" . You can't overtake that.
Actually, there might be a way. The "Kleenex" brand of tissue has become so popular that people now say Kleenex instead of tissue. It got to the point that a judge ruled that Kleenex is now no longer a protected trademark, but in the common domain. So at some point, Google might have to change their name to something else.
There's a new article that just came out today. Some things that I found interesting:
I asked Wolfram if he was thinking in terms of selling off Wolfram|Alpha to a big company like Google. “I’m not a selling things kind of guy,” he said firmly. He sees his new program as a long-term project whose development he wants to guide. “We’d rather look for things like partnerships or licensing deals or APIs. I see a new field of knowledge-based computing. Imagine a spread sheet that can pull in knowledge about the entries.”
As Wolfram|Alpha comes into widespread use, Stephen believes “It will raise the level of scientific things that the average person can do. People will find that the world is more predictable than they might have expected. Just as running Google is like having a reference librarian to help you, running Wolfram|Alpha will be like having a house scientist to consult for you.”
Kicking off our conversation, Stephen remarks that, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t really a search engine, because we compute the answers, and we discover new truths. If anything, you might call it a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before.”
Despite his disclaimer, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there’s a one-line box where you type in a question. The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box. What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer.
Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, “3/26/2009 + 90 days” you’ll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter “mt. everest height length of golden gate” you’ll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter “temperature in los gatos,” you’ll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.
Wow, there is a huge difference between Google and Wolfram Alpha. If it works as advertised then I think it will be very useful, even more so than Google for factual questions. However, it doesn't look like it will be overtaking Google, as people will still need to use Wolfram Alpha alongside a conventional search engine.
bet you never heard of any of them either (to be fair, some of those are actually good. cuil was made by ex-googlers for example, is really fast and gives great results. plus it has that whole slickness going for it, just like google. but you still haven't heard of it.)
I use answers for at least like 40% of my web searches.
If you're looking for a webpage, use google. If you want a quick information on something, type it in answers.com.
so basically, you no doubt will be able to type your question into google, and the first result will probably end up being the answer from wolfphwhateverthefuck.com
On April 10 2009 14:02 iSCOUT4u wrote: I hope google dies...im really getting tired of hearing "google it" i hate that ppl go with whatever is newer...even if it isnt better. This thing seems like an awesome tool though
This sounds awesome. It will either be a revolutionary system or an embarrassing flop - I hope for the former.
"Google Killer" seems a but of a misnomer to me, since WolframAlpha (which better be renamed when it comes out!) will probably be doing different things from Google. It will be able to understand language and find answers to questions! Though things like "who am i," or "what does my dog eat for dinner" might mess with it a little haha. It will be awesome once they program it with non-English languages as well. Seriously though, Wolfram is a really super smart dude - if you've ever used Mathematica or read any part of NKS you'll know what I mean.
I, for one, welcome our new search engine overlord.
On April 12 2009 16:47 fight_or_flight wrote: You know whats really crazy? Two years ago I sent an email to both Google and Wolfram Research telling them that you should be able to enter mathematica commands into the google search bar. My argument is that it would be good for everyone for a number of reasons which I laid out.
I later got an email from someone at Wolfram telling me that we'd have a lot more to discuss if it they could talk. Well it turns out thats the approximate time they started this project.
if wolfram kills google, im holding you responsible.
Thats a good thing, right? that means a single company won't have access to both your email and searches.
Although I think the title of this blog is horrible. Wolfram alpha isn't competing with google nor is it attempting to.
Also, about the thread title, I originally made this post on Gawker's article entitled: "The Humans Who Will Kill the Google Machine." So naturally I picked a similar title for my thread as a lead-in to the article.
I've had this page bookmarked since about a month ago, really eager to give it a try once it's up. I'll keep an unbiased mindset until I've given it a try. From those videos though, it seems that it might be easier to use for people without a computer background, since it eliminates the need for general knowledge of computer logic. You don't have to be as specific about your keyword search and it organizes the information better. However, I look forward to seeing how powerful the search results can be when the user is rather ambiguous and unclear about what he/she wants.
There's going to be a live webcast beginning at 8pm EST tonight.
I hope it lives up to its hype, but this is launch day ... and I've seen some terrible launch days for stuff like this. Anyway, I'll be pleasantly surprised if everything runs smoothly and on time. Even if my searches come up with initially useless results, I'll still give it a chance because search engines tend to need a lot of refinement - and that means it can improve over time.
The idea is very different from google. In order to use google, you need to break up your question into relevant keywords (some people have alot of trouble doing this); wolfram saves you this step.
This is supposed to be more natural and therefore appealing to more people.
Result: there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)\n(asked of a general swallow (but not answered) in Monty Python\'s Holy Grail.)
On May 16 2009 12:04 JeeJee wrote: abstruse goose is too good
Rofl <3 abstruse good. I checked out and didnt like it too much, too weak too limited with almost no information or biographies, killing google is just a dream + google will probably figure this stuff out before them.
wolfram alpha answers specific questions rather than explaining general topics way to read the faq ^_^
It was intended to have some interesting computational ability. It was claimed to be capable of making connections between data down several levels. It so far demonstrates neither of these. I can only hope that its functionality will increase rapidly over the next month or two.
it's good for everything that is realated to numbers, but it epic fails at persons and names .. if you try to type in your name you will probably get an analysis of how many digits it has and how many chemical elements are in it ..
Dude, its made for math formulas and shit and it doesn't even have the math formula that was probably used about a thousand times to make the damned thing.
Dude, its made for math formulas and shit and it doesn't even have the math formula that was probably used about a thousand times to make the damned thing.
so, curious, what did you expect it to spit out when you put up big O? link to wiki? once again, that's not what walpha does
Well, I will defiantly use this. I type in my questions word from word on Google and still cannot find a good answer 1/2 the time unless it is a common question or something like that, and then it links me to yahoo.
Having played with it since it launched last night... when it's good it's very good, but it's not often good. The syntax parser is too restricted and too easily confused. For example, I input
2^2
and it returns "4". I input
primes >= 4
and it returns a bunch of prime numbers greater than 4. But when I input
primes >= (2^2)
it flips out and gets confused.
If you ask it for
median salary ohio fireman
it returns "$38 890 per year" and some nice graphs. But if you change it to
median salary UK lawyer
it doesn't return anything. A little experimentation suggests that it doesn't have salary data for the UK - so it should tell us this, rather than saying it doesn't know what we're talking about.
Instead, it suggests
median salary UK
Okay, I think, maybe this is the median salary for all people in the UK (not just lawyers). What does it return? "$2.801 trillion per year". wtf?
While this is very exciting and has a great deal of potential, there's a lot of little problems, and the user-friendliness needs to be improved greatly.
(Also, as an aside, I don't think this even intends to be a google killer. Google finds webpages, whereas Wolfram Alpha is for getting computable knowledge. In fact, whenever you enter a query into Wolfram Alpha, at the bottom right of the results page is a "search the web" link which takes you directly to google, showing that Wolfram don't consider Google a threat to their market share. The way I see it, Wolfram Alpha is more of a cross between Wikipedia (or some other giant online encyclopedia) and a calculator; not a Google equivalent.)
It's pretty awesome idea, but damn its still far away from having even 50% from all systematic mankind knowledge. Still props for trying, might work out in a long term.
Dude, its made for math formulas and shit and it doesn't even have the math formula that was probably used about a thousand times to make the damned thing.
so, curious, what did you expect it to spit out when you put up big O? link to wiki? once again, that's not what walpha does
Did you even attempt to read my post? I expected it to spit out what I said in my post. Not a wikipedia link, not a list of websites, nothing like that. I fully understand what the website is for. The wikipedia link was for anyone ignorant enough to think I actually expected this website to be google. Obviously it goes deeper than that.
holy shit guys.... this is what i put in... (of which Wolfram gave the correct response)
Q: limit as x approach 0, sin x / x Q: to be or not to be Q: limit as x approach infinity, (1+1/x)^x Q: cos(pi) + i sin(pi) + 1 //AKA Euler's Identity Q: e^pi > pi^e Q: mass of neutron - mass of proton - mass of electron Q: plot sqrt(x^2) Q: integrate e^x/x! Q: differentiate e^x/x! Q: the next solar eclipse
I can't seem to make it do state space equations. If it is capable of that as well, then I will probably never need to use matcad, matlab, or mathematica again.
I can't seem to make it do state space equations. If it is capable of that as well, then I will probably never need to use matcad, matlab, or mathematica again.
I can't seem to make it do state space equations. If it is capable of that as well, then I will probably never need to use matcad, matlab, or mathematica again.
I can't seem to make it do state space equations. If it is capable of that as well, then I will probably never need to use matcad, matlab, or mathematica again.
I can't seem to make it do state space equations. If it is capable of that as well, then I will probably never need to use matcad, matlab, or mathematica again.
Question: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Answer: A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
Seems to be an ambiguous sentence. You read it as A woodchuck will chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. I read it as A woodchuck chucks all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
Though my English is not up to par with an English language teacher.
On May 18 2009 15:23 Garnet wrote: It says ln(x) = log(x). WTF?
Yes, because that's the convention in Mathematica. WolframAlpha does return the correct deriv, indef integral, max, min and all that (of the natural logarithim, that is)
On April 10 2009 14:04 EvilTeletubby wrote: So... this is basically like Ask Geeves; useful for retards that don't know how to properly use a search engine?
WORD i see people type shit into search engines like:
"how can i get to the mall on the bus"
>.<
and i work in a library, im dead fuckin serious
I don't think they're idiots. They just need an HCI that search engines can't support yet. This kind of highly contextual search is going to be a huge area of innovation in search over the coming months and years. Check this out for an early example.
So today, you've got this kind of contextual search based on the country you're in. You've already got it based on information in the same browsing session (for example do a Google Maps query for SFO, and then a query immediately following that for Pizza to see what I mean).
As far as WolframAlpha goes, I don't think it's going to go anywhere. It couldn't handle most queries I threw at it the other day (e.g. a vanity search, search for "May 28", some local info, searching for a formula). Some things it did really well (like a query for Microsoft's stock ticker MSFT), but that doesn't feel scalable to me. They basically have to hand-build every query type like they did for stock tickers for this to work. And there's no way they can possibly anticipate all the types of queries people will want to create results as compelling as their stock tickers for everything.
It seems like a by nerds, for nerds type toy to me rather than a real application I might consider using over Google.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll83/nremind/wolframalpha.jpg)
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