Wolfram Alpha - The Holy Grail of Search Engines....

Why would Google be worried? They can just buy it.

That's a good point. Unless you have an axe to grind, why fight a protracted war when you can get the big payoff and walk away happy?

And somehow I can't imagine "wolfram" being turned into a verb.

I'm a bit skeptical, but only because AskJeeves which later became Ask.com has been trying to do this for a long time now and no one seems to care. Is the ability to be able to ask questions rather than using keywords really that important to users? I'd be much happier personally if they found a way to make picture searches better. Or introduced blog only searches (I'm talking about google here) or Science Web Page searches, in other words, subsets of the web.

No one seems to care because it never worked as implied. Ask Jeeves or Ask just pulls a few keywords from your query and uses them for the search. In essence its no different than any other search engine.

If I ask a question like "How many AMC Ramblers were produced in 1966?"; a traditional search engine is going to provide links to a host of sites providing information related to 1966 ramblers, but then I have to crawl through the links to see if my desired info is available.

IF WA works as advertised - and if the information is available on the Web, then I'd get an actual answer. No additional searching necessary. That would be pretty cool - and yes that would be very important to me.

You wrote:"IF WA works as advertised - and if the information is available on the Web, then I'd get an actual answer. No additional searching necessary. That would be pretty cool - and yes that would be very important to me."

Ok, I'll agree that that would be cool, I assumed that you asked it in real language and it would return webpages. I didn't realize they were saying it would provide direct answers as responses. Google dabbles in that now in the sense that you can type in a unit conversion or a physical constant and at the top of it's returns it gives you an actual answer (For Example , or another Example).

I think I have a bit of prejudice about Stephen Wolfram. He's a brilliant guy, really great at math, but he notoriously over-reaches and over-states. A good example of this is the book he wrote called A New Kind of Science which was going to revolutionize science.

I found this video of a demonstration he gave at Harvard of Wolfram Alpha and it is really cool looking. I hope I'm wrong and it works as advertised since it would be a really useful tool.

It's funny, I've gone from skeptical to intrigued in the process of writing this response.

It's live, but the results of my query "How many AMC Ramblers were produced in 1966?" were underwhelming:

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

I then truncated the question to "AMC Rambler" to which I received the following results:

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Related inputs to try:

Finance:

• financial information rambler

Nothing for AMC Rambler? Sure it wasn't a very good car, but c'mon - Nothing????????

Not particularly impressed.

Yeah, it's not a general-purpose search engine. However it is VERY good in specific niches. For example, in it kicks a** in mathematics (you'd expect Wolfram to do well there..) Unfortunately, every time a new search engine appears, the press starts with the "Google Killer" rhetoric.

Hey Roger,

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for, but they do have blog searches, university searches, science searches, etc.

just click on the about link and then on the Services & Tools line, where you will

find a list of available search options. (blog, image, scholar, directory)

http://www.google.ca/intl/en/options/universities.html

http://scholar.google.com/

http://www.google.ca/books?hl=en

Chris

Chris,

Thanks for the links. I wasn't aware of the book search, that's really great, I'll try and remember to use that in the future.

Many of that stuff is useful to be sure, I just would like to see the results done more thoroughly. Every scientist I know has a webpage detailing their work, but none of those searches seemed to bring back the pages of scientists. When I suggest specialized search I mean millions of pages that have to do with physics or engineering returned, not just a few hand picked ones by google (few being tens of thousands in this case)

Please don't get me wrong, I will use the links you provided and they are certainly in the direction of what I'd like to see more of, they just aren't all the way there yet.

Also, since I often complain about corporations as being mindless, heartless, dumb, money machines, I should say I admire google's "lets just try it" outlook. I'm rooting for it to work for them in a big way.

Roger

If it is half as good as it claims; I would rather see it as a program to be bought. If Google, or anyone else buys it, you will still get those stupid "BUY YOUR BRAIN TUMOR HERE AT stupidsalesareus.com".

Unfortunately, search engines don't work that way. Your home computer has nowhere near the horsepower or bandwidth to crawl, index, and store the web. Even if it did, millioins of home computers constantly crawling the web are the last thing anyone would want.

I'll be very interested if the results are truly "in context" and if truly relevant web pages are at the top of a search results list.

It will also be interesting to observe the openness (of lack thereof) of explanations provided for whether and how his ideas for computational study, models, simplicity comparisons, or any other specific elements of NKS have finally been applied in the real world for a useful product. hmmm...

Introduction to WolframAlpha

Well, I've had a chance to use it. Certainly not a general search engine, more of a niche search engine.

I think the key is that it does several things much much better than google. For instance unit conversions, integration, weather and demographics, and other statistics.

I think I'll be using it, if only for specialized problems (integration and units for sure), which is more than I can say for any other search engine besides google.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think this search engine will be a success. Not another google for sure, but a success.