Wolfram Alpha coming - beware Google

It is a joke in comparison, but it really should not be trying to compete. All those comparing it to google are silly IMO it should be thought of as a different (and currently more useless) product. If it gets better then great, and eventually who knows maybe it might move into google's territory or vice versa, but now those who are predicting doom and gloom for google are just hyping it for attention.

 

Yeah this is no competitor to Google. I don't think they are currently trying to do that. It does some impressive stuff, but it's usefulness is going to depend on how well it can be generalized to more things without human assistance.

 

It "could" be a competitor to google in some key area's however.

For example as a search function for a singular site and/or forum.

Anywhere there's a limited set of information that needs to be searched.

As a global search tool however, I'd have some reservations. Not the least of them being information control.

[Edit] After trying it a bit, I do notice they seem to avoid anything that might be controversial with strongly differing viewpoints.

Regards,
SB

 

I searched for Stephen Colbert and it gave me his full name, date and place of birth, the fact that he is a comedian and it gave me this:



Oh yes! This is information I can use. One further critique: the URL is too long. Is it named Alpha because it is in Alpha stage or is it part of the full name?

 

Right now it has interesting gaps. For example when I search for "high tides miami", it gives me tide calendar. But I could'n come up with a search term, which would give me highest water level in 2008 or 1950-2008 or sometihing like that.

 

LOL. "Loading NaN%". Must be the same team who do Sainsbury's software

 

But Wolfram Alpha doesn't give me web results. It's not comparable to Google. It's comparable to Google calculator, but that's just a small feature of the Google text box.

I searched for Formula 1 and it gave me results from a movie called The Formula.

Wolfram Alpha is just a glorified Google Calculator and the URL is still too long and cumbersome.

 

I haven't tried Google Squared (it only squares numbers ATM so it obviously isn't live), but I will say this: Wolfram Alpha is the king of trivia.

 

In that case you ought to say that to begin with instead of jump on the foolish hype bandwagon trotting out silly statements such as "beware google" Is it a google killer? A wikipedia killer? Right now wolfram alpha willslay very little.

And that was a good catch earlier it shows what happens when you try to change what you wrote to be less insulting without going back and reading the entire post. I guess that is a lesson of some kind.

 

It's a piece of crap. I type in San Francisco demographics and it doesn't understand the search terms. Hopefully it will be less a piece of crap soon.

 

The problem is the way it is designed. Basically it seems like a phone help bank where you call in and they direct you to some expert that knows the answer.

In this case instead though they have an army of folks entering the answers in advance (or getting them from databases they pay to access) and then you are directed to such an answer if it happens to be entered. (Though of course there is a great deal more hand waving and I am sure it is complex ) Still the point is it does not have the answers many people want to very simple questions let alone the answer to questions that traditional web searching finds difficult to answer. Instead it seems it has a variety of answers to specific questions. So if your answer happens to be there it will speed up the time to get it, but otherwise it is just useless.

The thing is I wonder if the end goal is a subscription service just like encyclopedias failed to sell in the internet age.

 

It wont work everytime unless they throw inputs at some insanely well designed AI (i'm rather sceptical about abilities of today AI's to answer less than obvious questions). You can't categorise automatically every possible name, attribute, function and setup relations between them so that wouldn't lead to hilarious answers in some cases.
Or can you ?

 

I've been trying more and more things. For me it has about a 1:2 ratio of actually having something to report with the words I use. I guess since it's still new it can only get better.