A Look At the Wolfram Alpha "Search Engine" 216
An anonymous reader points out a ReadWriteWeb piece on an hour-long demo of Wolfram|Alpha (which we discussed at its announcement). Stephen Wolfram does not like to call it a "search engine," preferring instead the term "computational knowledge engine." It will open to the public in May. "The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next 'Google killer' from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype — though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a 'Google killer.' According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information."
Google started the ball rolling... (Score:4, Insightful)
...with their web-crawling keyword-sculling technology, but it's only normal that someone else was researching what to ~do~ with all the data. IE (data analysis for human comprehension) and Google would make one fierce - and useful - blend.
I wouldn't hold my breath (Score:5, Insightful)
It took Mathematica many years to become even marginally correct and useful. If Alpha proceeds at the same pace, it won't have any impact at all.
My god, it's full of... (Score:4, Insightful)
FTFA:
...according to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).
5 *million* lines of Mathematica? How many code monkeys does he have working for him?
A New Kind Of "Living Up To" (Score:4, Insightful)
The Hype: The singularity is here people and Wolfram is our prophet!
The Demo: It's like a search engine but not as good, so he doesn't like you calling it that.
The Product: I can't wait.
Google-killer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google won't be killed until someone perfects an AI that you can have a search 'conversation' with, who can understand goddamn context and intelligently narrow down, find relevant articles that don't contain your keywords, etc. Kinda like the librarian from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" novel, but more powerful.
The main reason no one will beat Google until then is that Google is extremely wealthy and can outspend you as it continually perfects information sorting itself, not to mention buy any technology that comes close to threatening it. If you really developed a Google-killer and presented it to the world, do you also have the stones to turn down, say, $100 million? I don't think so, it would take you probably 20-30 years to make that on your own, if you're lucky, with the search field full of competition and Google's mature business-plan in place. Even the days of Alta-Vista were essentially the Cowboy West, unsophisticated and without any proven business plans. Google walked in and owned right away, then discovered how to make money off search when no one else was.
Even then, the founders of Google tried to sell their brilliant search idea not for $100 million dollars, but for $1 million dollars, and there were no takers. They were forced to go it alone. If someone had offered them $500,000 they probably would've taken it and ran.
Although, if you really do develop an AI, there'll be a billion more profit opportunities than search, that's peripheral. An AI can do menial labor far better, faster, stronger than a human. What happens when McDonalds is staffed solely by robots. That would be pretty damn cool actually. They work for the price of electricity, maybe we can get the price of a cheeseburger back down to $0.25 :D
Re:This could work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, ya know, not.
I'm not calling Wolfram a big academic fraud with an even bigger opinion of himself, but so far we've seen no evidence that he has done anything.
The hype? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the first time I've ever heard about it and I usually check technologically acclimated news sites. Is this a "Google killer" like Cuil was?
Re:This could work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, ya know, not.
I'm not calling Wolfram a big academic fraud with an even bigger opinion of himself, but so far we've seen no evidence that he has done anything.
I said it could work. ;)
So far there's no evidence in either direction. But it's more fun to stay optimistic.
Re:search engine that supports pregex (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still waiting on a decent search engine that supports perl regular expressions
You'll be waiting for a long time. It's impossible to index a database for matching via regex, therefore searches on such an engine would be inordinately expensive to process.
3.125% (Score:4, Insightful)
Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." [...] Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case).
Your "uncle's uncle's brother's son" could well be your father.
Re:Great for financial data (Score:3, Insightful)
Why it stays that way is more interesting, but beyond the scope of this posting.
Would it be entirely inaccurate if I could summarize that with the single word "greed"?
Re:Google started the ball rolling... (Score:5, Insightful)
This blog post reads more like a marketing piece written by a shill, and if there is any hype, it just seems like it's just self-delusion or just wishful thinking at this point.
Any search engine query and corresponding results can be manually optimized and tweaked to quasi-perfection. In fact, that's the exact recipe many of the now defunct search engines were using a while ago. They would optimize the hell out of a couple of queries or use case scenarios, and then they would fall in love with the layout and content of their contrived results. And then, when the users didn't use the search engine the way the developers wanted them to use it, the developers tried changing the behaviors of their users instead of trying to change their search engine. For the most recent example of this, of actually one company that still had money to waste a year ago, think back to the ask.com commercial where they tried to teach us about the *cool* ajax feature of previewing web sites. Not that this feature was bad per say, but if it was any good, or groundbreaking in any usable way, users would be telling each other about it -- they wouldn't need to be educated about it -- at such a large expense.
And the same goes for the tone of this blog post was written in. It was written from the perspective of a shill, or from the perspective of the company itself, but not from the perspective of an actual user. Personally, I don't want to know about the supposed hype or marketing-speak from the developer's own mouth, I just want to know how useful it's going to be for me. And I don't want contrived examples, I want one or two random example from the (supposedly independent) blogger himself (if possible). And I don't want an actual screenshot of the search box, I want the actual search box itself. Am I only one who tried clicking on it? And if you're going to give me the screenshot of something, give me the screenshot of the search results page (at the very least) and not just a verbal description of it.
Which brings me to my last point: Show. Don't tell. And if there is one thing that Google does well, it's that they don't try to prematurely hype their nascent lab products. They release them first, then they see if the users fall in love with their creation (or not), which is rather a hit-or-miss proposition and a long iterative process. So don't tell me about a fancy search engine, if it's not even out for a public trial yet. I want to try it. I don't want to be told about it.
Re:Google-killer? (Score:5, Insightful)
The main reason no one will beat Google until then is that Google is extremely wealthy and can outspend you as it continually perfects information sorting itself, not to mention buy any technology that comes close to threatening it.
Yes because it's always the wealthy, on top company that innovates the ground breaking ideas, like the airplane, the home computer, the telephone...
Oh wait...
Re:My god, it's full of... (Score:3, Insightful)
And 10,000 CPUs and expanding for the public launch... who is going to pay for all that? It's not that Google has a few more of those CPUs running now, but when Google went public I'm quite sure it was less. They just expanded with the expansion of their market.
Maybe this is the late 90s again (prepare for totally unrealistic user numbers), or this search engine indeed needs so much horse power, meaning in effect that it can never become profitable.
Also the article talks about queries running a few seconds, instead of a typical 0.2 seconds for a Google search. That already indicates 5-50 times the computational resources just to get the answer on a query, and thus much higher cost per query than Google et. al have.
Re:Great for financial data (Score:5, Insightful)
The end of understanding stuff. (Score:4, Insightful)
Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.
So this means we just get the straight answer in the future. No more thinking for yourself, no more understanding where the answer comes from, no more critical thinking about the validity of the answer. E.g. TFA mentions that the answer to how many Internet users there are in Europe includes the factoid that there are only 93 in Vatican City. Is this true? Well it must be because Alpha gives it, right? Or maybe it is not true? But why would it be not true and what would be a more realistic number? How many people do really live/work in Vatican City, for example? How does this relate to the number of Internet users?
An encyclopedia search will give one heaps of background information that is highly relevant to the question, and gives a lot of understanding about the answer. It makes the answer more than just a number.
For example if one would look up the question "what is the national flag of the USA", the answer is of course "the stars and stripes", and may include an image. But now I happen to know there is a story behind it: why this number of stars, and that number of stripes, and those colours. I bet this will be in Wikipedia's answer but not in Alpha's answer.
Search engines like this sound really interesting to me, and can be very useful, though it will never replace textbooks and encyclopedias. There is just so much more to answer to a query than just a straight number. And there are so many questions that can not be answered that way, such as "why is polcarbonate so much more temperature resistant than polyethylene?" for example. The full answer to this question includes details about the chemical make-up of the two polymers, and how polymer chains work. That is what textbooks are for.
Re:Google started the ball rolling... (Score:5, Insightful)
IE (data analysis for human comprehension) and Google would make one fierce - and useful - blend.
Finding relevant information other than the Wikipedia page for any specialist topic is a pain in the ass. If these guys can find a way to index only the good stuff, i.e. not based on general popularity but content accuracy, they could have a future.
Do I have to remind everyone how annoying it is to search for technical documentation for something vaguely Linux-related, only to find the first 30 hits are various forums with more or less clueless newbies discussing installation difficulties and the syntax of apt-get?
Re:My god, it's full of... (Score:3, Insightful)
Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk.
That were, at the time, very serious computing resources, but nothing special for a university to have available. Nowadays this will be the same: just add a zero or two for to the specs. It is even something that a normal start-up with venture capital funding can afford, start up a little smaller and it becomes living room material. 1000/1000M Internet is readily available even for consumers, so even bandwidth is not a problem. For starting up there is no need to index "the Internet", just a large enough chunk of it. 5-10% will do for starters, really, almost all you want to know is there already, just the more obscure stuff not but that will come automatically in time. Even Google is indexing only a part of the Internet, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is only about 50-70% of all the pages available.
It may have become harder to enter the search market than it was, but certainly not undoable. Sergei and Larry started this at their university as research project, using stuff they had sitting around there. No reason why it can not be done again that way.
Re:Google-killer? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, because today all airplanes are sold by Wright Brothers Inc...
Oh wait...
Re:I wouldn't hold my breath (Score:4, Insightful)
Where can I download your better option?