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http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html
"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."
More of the article here
Update (04/13/2009): more info about Wolfram Alpha is available http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/wolframalpha-searching-truth
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.
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United States5770 Posts
Wow that's sooooo cool.
Mathematica is a really amazing program that can be really fun to play around with if you're into math.
If anyone can beat google, it's probably that guy.
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foolish. it's either going to take a lot of time or a lot of money to unseat google.
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konadora
Singapore66357 Posts
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'?"
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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 
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Baltimore, USA22258 Posts
So... this is basically like Ask Geeves; useful for retards that don't know how to properly use a search engine?
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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
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Do you think it answers religious questions?
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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?
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Baltimore, USA22258 Posts
On April 10 2009 14:08 Mooga wrote:Show nested quote +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.
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interesting. will definitely check it out once it launches.
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Radical innovation always end an era. It's only a matter of when and who owns the radical innovation.
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yeah here are some other google killers
http://www.answers.com/bb/
http://www.icerocket.com/
http://www.cuil.com/
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.)
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Sydney2287 Posts
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.
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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
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On April 10 2009 14:11 EvilTeletubby wrote:Show nested quote +On April 10 2009 14:08 Mooga wrote: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.
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On April 10 2009 14:11 EvilTeletubby wrote:Show nested quote +On April 10 2009 14:08 Mooga wrote: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.
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Sydney2287 Posts
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.
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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.
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On April 10 2009 14:14 JeeJee wrote:yeah here are some other google killers http://www.answers.com/bb/http://www.icerocket.com/http://www.cuil.com/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.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i286.photobucket.com/albums/ll83/nremind/wolframalpha.jpg)
