Wolfram Alpha vs. Google — Results Vary 255
wjousts writes "Technology Review has an article comparing various search results from Wolfram Alpha and Google. Results vary. For example, searching 'Microsoft Apple' in Alpha returns data comparing both companies stock prices, whereas Google top results are news stories mentioning both companies. However, when searching for '10 pounds kilograms,' Alpha rather unhelpfully assumes you want to multiply 10 pounds by 1 kilogram, whereas Google directs you to sites for metric conversions. Change the query to '10 pounds in kilograms' and both give you the result you'd expect (i.e. 4.536 kg)."
this just in (Score:5, Insightful)
Karma be damned, but..
No one cares about a new search engine. Really, Google suits all my needs.
Re:this just in (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:this just in (Score:5, Insightful)
Karma be damned, but..
No one cares about a new search engine. Really, Google suits all my needs.
I would claim that's a dangerous mentality. I was using Metacrawler until Google came along. Even though Google is included in Metacrawler, its simplicity and speed won me over. Is that to say no one can compete with Google? Not at all.
... the posts weren't sitting firmly. A man offered to lend me his post hole digger [about.com] which did that specific task better. No, I wasn't using the post hole digger to dig a trench for a sewage line but adding it to my collection of tools made me more effective at my tasks--so long as I used it for what it was best at.
I used to dig holes with my hands which was painful and time consuming. When it became clear this wouldn't work, I discovered a spade [wikipedia.org] did the job much better. And I used it for everything. Though one day I was putting up fences and lamented the width of my spade's blade
The hype machine has worked, I will try out Wolfram Alpha and see if it is better than Google or can replace some of the capabilities I use Google to accomplish.
Competition = good (Score:2, Insightful)
Bramleys to Granny Smiths? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:this just in (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I wouldn't switch away from Google no matter what, but if you see this more as "basic" research, eventually if it eventually turns out to be superior then you can be sure that Google will buy it and integrate it to its search service.
So while concurrencing Google directly is futile, such research can participate to ultimately improve it, and put a few millions in the creator's pocket.
Missing the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Typing in "Cancer New York" could mean anything.
If you gave that question to a human they'd have no idea what your were looking for.
Why didn't he try asking the question he was trying to ask which was "What are the rates of cancer in new york?" or even just "Cancer rate in new york"
All his other searches are equally stupid.
10 pounds kilograms (Score:4, Insightful)
Reminds me of when I was in France, and still having trouble understanding the spoken French language. I was talking to a guy who asked me, in translation, "Brothers, sisters, one, two, three?" It took me a while to figure out he wanted to know how many siblings I had. Dumbing down the question like that didn't help me understand him any better, it made it worse. Using correct French grammar and simply slowing it down would have been much more helpful.
I imagine Wolfram Alpha is like that.
Why are most examples side to side comparisons? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is Wolfram Alpha especially good in doing side to side comparisons (ex. from the article: "Microsoft Apple", "Stanford Harvard", "Utah Florida", "Utah Florida population")? Or why did the article test both engines with those queries?
I would have rather expected, complete questions that are nevertheless hard to answer (unless you know a source), such as:
1) "How many bull terriers are in the UK?"
Google: link to Bullterriers on Wikipedia and some dog clubs in the UK.
Wolfram: ???
2) "How many blind people live in the US?"
Google: first link to WikiAnsers (about 1 million, but without any references). Next links seem to be more serious, but difficult to get a real answer to that question (it depends on how you interprete "blind").
Wolfram: ???
3) "What is the color of a strawberry?"
Google: This confuses me, apparently it has many colors...
Wolfram: ???
4) Apparently we need to use a comparison question: "strawberry blackberry" ...
Google: I am getting hungry when I am following all those recipe links
Re:this just in (Score:5, Insightful)
I RTFA and, even when searching for answers, Google mopped the floor with Wolfram Alpha
That's funny, I RTFA too, and I came to a completely different conclusion. I think perhaps we have different definitions of "answers".
The conclusion I drew is that if you're looking for technical/scientific data Alpha does a much better job. In particular, it brings together lots of relevant bits and pieces which may not exist on any single web site. Google will probably find it all for you, but you'll have to do more digging. On the other hand, if you're looking for news, commentary or opinion, Google is the much better choice.
I more frequently find myself looking for data, so I wouldn't be surprised if my usage tends to favor Alpha. Heck, as it is 95% of my usage of Google is to search for a Wikipedia article -- and often I'm looking for that to find links to tables of data. Your goals and search patterns may be different, so your usage may favor Google.
I suspect that Alpha is going to be a very useful tool within its domain, but I don't expect it to displace Google to any significant degree.
Re:Conversions (Score:3, Insightful)
Me too, I mean I should TOTALLY be able to write almost non-human readable "10 kilograms pounds" instead of google's "10 kilograms in pounds". That's so much more difficult!
Re:Wat. Wolfram Alpha is not even a search engine. (Score:3, Insightful)
It will, however, give you an answer to "How many more people died in World War 1 than World War 2?" as that is based on fact.
N.B. I don't care how many died in either war; It's an example of a question with a definite answer.
Blogger Learn English (Score:4, Insightful)
How about a test involving actual English-language questions and not just keywords? You know, like all those old tests from school that said "please use complete sentences". There is a reason languages have things like prepositions, adjectives and other parts of speech. They actually help put your communication into context.
Nobody knows what the hell you mean with "Cancer New York" because there is no context. How about "cancer statistics for new york" or "cancer treatment in new york"?
Re:Wat. Wolfram Alpha is not even a search engine. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, they take different approaches, work in different ways, and each perform well in areas where the other does not. That doesn't mean they don't compete with one another.
An airplane and a train have very little in common WRT how they work. A train can't get you frmo St. Louis to London. Taking a plane from Munich to Vienna is lunacy. Yet, planes and trains do compete with one another.
explicit phrasing (Score:5, Insightful)
Alpha rather unhelpfully assumes you want to multiply 10 pounds by 1 kilogram
Actually, while I agree that is unhelpful, I also don't like the other assumption. Maybe I'm already growing old, but I don't mind if people actually say what they mean instead of speaking or writing in some kind of shortcut-verbs-are-too-expensive-so-I-leave-them-out abbreviated style and leave it to the listener/reader to decypher whatever it could possibly be they mean.
So if you want 10 pounds in kilograms, what exactly is the trouble with actually writing those three (counting the space) additional characters?
Re:this just in (Score:4, Insightful)
I use Google. I will likely continue to use Google for some time. However...
Competition is essential. It's good for us, good for Google too. Google, and every other search engine past and present, has failed to meet my needs. It's still to hard to find relevant articles without commerce-based noise and link-farm sites.
Image search, for example -- near worthless.
It's also annoying to find a wikipedia entry at the top of the page rank for almost everything on Google. This is skewed, and bears no relation to the individual rank (and thus merit) of the wikipedia page. I want facts, not what some guy thinks. I know where wikipedia is, if I wanted to search it, I would. I don't.
Google has much room for improvement. After 12 years of Google there's been little to no improvement in Search (in fact the opposite, Google-gaming has increased). Competition is the only solution to that. Bring it on, Wolfram. Bring it on anyone with new ideas in Search. We all need you (even Google).
Expectations (Score:2, Insightful)
Somehow I have different expectations than the author about what some search terms should provide:
SEARCH TERM: Microsoft Apple
WA gives a comparison of stock prices. From TFA I conclude that's also what the author expected. I wouldn't expect that. If I were looking for stock prices, I'd add "stock" to the search term. With "Microsoft Apple" I'd expect to get some relations between Microsoft and Apple (where they compete, what the main differences are, maybe a comparison of market shares).
SEARCH TERM: 10 pounds kilograms
WA's interpretation is the most reasonable. After all, it's the standard way to denote multiplications (as in newton meters, ampere seconds or kilowatt hours). It would never have occured to me to omit the "in" even in Google.
Re:Wat. Wolfram Alpha is not even a search engine. (Score:3, Insightful)
What exactly do you think the end purpose of either tool is?
The end purpose of Google is to find a web page? No, that's not the end purpose; you want the page for a reason. Usually the reason is to get information. The end purpose of WA is to find information as well. Their purpose is the same, so the comparison is perfectly good. Just like comparing a train to a plane.
Comparing Google to WA is considerably more relevant to most people than comparing Google to "a person". First of all, to compare google to "a person", you're going to have to pick a person (as results would vary wildly from person to person). Can you pick one person who a wide range of readers is likely to turn to as an alternative to Google? I'll bet you can't, and that's why that comparison would be irrelevant. (At best you might get a "human interest" angle out of picking someone well known for knowing things; i.e. "google vs. Ken Jennings" might've worked a few years back.)
But the same is not true of WA. WA will be a tool that a wide audience could consider as an alternative to Google when picking their first attempt to find some piece of information. So, the comparison is in fact perfectly relevant.
Re:this just in (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, I'm a fanboy, it has nothing to do that no serious superior alternative is going to pop up within the foreseeable future.
Just before Google there wasn't anyone standing around saying, "Just you wait, any day now I predict a company is going to offer web search that blows yahoo and hotbot out of the water."
Any particular reason nobody couldn't improve on google? There are lots of big shortcomings in google.
When I don't want to buy something, but google a product for reviews etc I have to sift through piles of garbage 'price comparison sites', and sites with: "0 reviews... be the first to review it".
When I -do- want to buy something, I STILL don't want a pile of link-spam price comparison sites, mostly pointing to companies that won't ship to Canada anyway.
Google sucks for localized/regional or country specific information searches.
Googles image search could use significant improvements.
When I search for answers to technical questions (programming / troubleshooting / etc), I'll find a link to a question asked on some forum, with answers. If that doesn't help, I don't need the next 7 links all to be to other sites with the EXACT SAME question and answers. (Apparently a lot of forum sites spider each other and/or usenet for their content...) I don't need to see that. I also don't much need links to forums where the question was asked six months ago, and never answered.
And going off on a bit of a tangent... 'expertsexchange' (WFT? 'expert sex change'??) Someone should really properly spider that waste of space. Sure the information is there... but what the hell??? A question, 2 pages of 'obscured' answers, then four pages of advertising for expertsexchange to get answers... but keep scrolling, and there is the question again, now with the un-obscured answers, and 2 pages of bickering about how the stupid effing points should be awarded.
Sure the signal is there but the S/N ratio is through the roof.
For me, other sites have -already- supplanted google as superior ways to find certain types of information.
Wikipedia is for example is far more useful than google as a search tool to get information and links to relevant sites for a lot of topics. There's a reason an awful lot of top google hits simply take you to wikipedia... might as well cut out the middle man.
This might surprise people (Score:4, Insightful)
Type this into google:
Who is Jamie Lee Curtis' mother?
Look closely at the first entry.
Re:this just in (Score:4, Insightful)
i would have loved to try it out today
Google is just getting filled with spam - so many people trying to get their stuff listed that the obscure things which have value when you need them bet buried.
the example for today - trying to find the registry key/value to force a volume in windows to be use write cache (aka Optimize for performance not quick removal)
i would love to see the correct search query to find the answer (that doesn't contain the answer) where the relevant page is within the first 10 results
- like how Google use to be before it was filled with spam
Re:this just in (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point. Google's answer to academia was supposedly the 'scholar' domain which focuses entirely on academic texts and related stuff. Unfortunately google did not hit the required niche, which is how to come up with answers that may not necessarily require an entire digitized book or paper reference. Google still works well because pagerank 'hitchhikes' on the findings of users and the popularity of certain query results, so the first page of google results usually includes 'interesting' things. But it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The popularity of google's results skew the results themselves. Also, if you ask certain people in information retrieval, they will tell you that the overall accuracy (precision, recall..etc) of Google results is around 10%.
What I am hoping for is that Wolfram manage to bridge the gap. Given the amount of money and excellent thinking the G-folks have put into things, it's quite the task.