Test Driving the Wolfram Alpha 124
SilverMind writes in to note a blog entry at Byte Size Biology describing in detail a few hours spent with Wolfram Alpha (which we have discussed before). "After playing around with Wolfram Alpha for a few hours, I can safely say the following: it's different, it's incomplete, it's idiosyncratic, and it's funky cool. And no, it will not dethrone Google, nor does it aim to do so."
Re:Needs a better name (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ralph."
E.g., "can you tell me the names of the original members of the Bay City Rollers?" "Ralph it for yourself."
Who came up with "Google Killer"? (Score:3, Insightful)
I am really getting sick of it. People who has no clue about what they write, adds cheap titles like "Google Killer" to every innovation in search, "iPhone killer" to mobile app/os/device etc.
It doesn't do any good to the service/device/software mentioned. It just guarantees the huge amount of people will be "free astroturfers" for Google/Apple etc. spreading jokes about the product no matter how good it is or how much potential it has.
No, you can't "kill" Google by simply inventing something and I don't believe a scientist run company has such stupid ideas in mind.
Re:Needs a better name (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you say "Observables for the Analysis of Event Shapes in e+ e- Annihilation and Other Processes" without taking a breath? Mr. Wolfram can :)
Seriously, that is not a general search engine or even engine as we understand today. It is something else. It is the click happy IT media which compares it to Google and I am sure people at Wolfram research either laughs or cries because of it.
What a giant viral marketing campain... (Score:2, Insightful)
...and you all are so completely falling for it.
It's just like with games. It's still half a century or something, until it is available to the general public, but already we get stuffed up to the nose with blablabla (for lack of a better term) about it. ^^
This alone is a reason for me to avoid it, and recommend you to do so too.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
The article got me interested, but when I wanted to try it out I got this page [wolframalpha.com]. It says "Launching May 2009," so I'll reserve my judgment.
It's not the calculations that make this interesting, it's the breadth of data available. Google is wildly popular because you can find information about nearly every obscure fact imaginable. If Wolfram can do the same with quantitative information it will also be wildly popular (albeit to a smaller audience.) If the search results are limited or irrelevant, I'll stick with Google and do the calculations myself.
Re:Video of Alpha in action (Score:1, Insightful)
"This video is not available in your country." Youtube sucks on purpose.
True Knowledge (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Alpha? (Score:4, Insightful)
When Google get their hands on this, it will be Wolfram Beta Forever.
But things with "Forever" in their name never ship!
Re:Video of Alpha in action (Score:1, Insightful)
If there are eyes on the page you can sell ads. If they're searching for TVs (your example) show them ads for TV. Show them ads for nearby stores that have offers on TVs. Show them ads for sites that have information about which TV is better and why. Show them ads for DVD rentals that they'll want to use with their new TV.
That's just the example you came up with... there is a lot of scope to advertising.
Re:Needs a better name (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, quite aside from all that, why the hell wouldn't one compare it to google when people would be using it for the exact same purpose.
People might use Wikipedia for the same purpose as Google, that doesn't mean we should compare them. The people who expect every Google search to work in Alpha are wrong. Those who expect genetic, scientific, or mathematical comparisons to work in Google as it is now are equally wrong. Hell, Alpha doesn't even search the internet, it has its own information database.
How are the two comparable again?
Re:Video of Alpha in action (Score:3, Insightful)
If there are eyes on the page you can sell ads. If they're searching for TVs (your example) show them ads for TV. Show them ads for nearby stores that have offers on TVs. Show them ads for sites that have information about which TV is better and why. Show them ads for DVD rentals that they'll want to use with their new TV.
That's just the example you came up with... there is a lot of scope to advertising.
...but all these things are based on data that a search engine like Google would have, and Wolfram, if I understand it correctly, would not.
Re:What a giant viral marketing campain... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because I avoid companies that use crooked methods such as viral marketing -- which is nothing else than lying about who you are, to sneak under the radar of "this is advertisement" -- to get the news out. Why not do it in a normal fashion? Why not really let others test it, instead of paying an employee to act as if he were not affiliated, to trick us?
Sorry, but this is morally unacceptable behavior. Something only crooks and criminals do. Plain and simple.
Re:Not A Search Engine (Score:3, Insightful)
They are working to provide a way to do things which people currently attempt to do (in Wolfram's eyes, with less success than they would with W|A) using Google (among other tools). It is, therefore, in any reasonable use of the words "compete" and "trying", trying to compete with Google in some part of the space in which Google is currently used.
It's "completely true" if and only if one defines "the conventional sense" in a very particular way to make it true. While it certainly isn't a search engine exactly like Google's, in the same way that Google's wasn't exactly like Yahoo! and the AltaVista engine wasn't exactly like either, it certainly is very much the same type of animal. Its more like the an improved version of Google's calculator features combined with Yahoo! old human moderated database combined with Google's I Feel Lucky! button. And yes, its different even from that.
Correct. It's a simple English sentence.
"There is no such thing as a 'verified scientific fact'" does not mean that no proposition can be verified, scientific, or factual, so, no, that doesn't follow at all from what I said.
That certain animals have certain features that match what is meant by the word "feathers" is an observation. It is a fact. It is "verified" in the sense that the observation has been repeated by many different people. It is not scientific (though explanations for why certain animals have those features and others do not may be scientific.) There is nothing scientific about facts, there is something scientific about certain ways of moving from observed facts to explanations with predictive power related to future observations.
Saying it over and over again isn't going to make it true.
Yes, it is.
One of those sorts is "information that answers as a specific question". Some (indeed most) of that information is provided in the form of links to external resources that are identified in Google's database that seem relevant to the query, though for certain questions (what movies are playing today in a specified geographical area, what is the population of a given country, what is the result of certain mathematical computations -- including some unit conversions) Google will attempt answer the question directly as well as providing links to potentially relevant external resources.
The similarity is that Google is one of the big existing players that W|A is going to have to show a clear advantage in utility in helping people answer their real questions for in order for it to be viable product in the market. There is a difference in that Google, when it came on the scene, was aiming pretty much at the entirety of Yahoo!'s utility, where W|A is targeting only a small piece of what Google is used for, and (at least it seems to me) targeting only a small segment of Google's audience even within that use. Nevertheless, they are clearly competing with Google.