Wolfram Alpha
 

Have you guys heard of this?

Wolfram (based in Champaign, IL) is launching a web search service to compete with Google.

From what I gather, it's supposed to be similar to what Ask Jeeves was intended to be, but is intended to answer much more complicated questions--and actually answer them, not just link you to web pages that may contain the answer.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

So its like wikipedia sorta?

Not quite. Wikipedia stores its own data and simply presents a pre-edited webpage as the result of a search. Wolfram Alpha creates a web page on the fly to answer the question posed.

yes heard it was a huge huge concentration of computing power

Fail.

If there's one place to run something like that, it's U of Illinois. They've basically been redefining the cutting edge of computing for decades.

calories avocado - gives an answer plus other nutritional info
health benefits avocado - doesn't compute
best avocado recipe - doesn't compute
world production avocado - doesn't compute
types of avocado - doesn't compute
avocado tree - doesn't compute

Hmm - not impressed.

Iran GDP - gives me a single number.
Iran revolution - does not compute. But suggests I try
"Units:
information about a unit revolution
Countries:
information about a country Iran"
whatever that means
Iran demographics - gives me some basic info.
Iran oil production - gives me 2007 4.7X10^6 bbl/day. Nothing about other years, trends, causes, etc.

Still not impressed.

So far, looks like a place to go if I have a narrow and obvious question that is answered by a single number and I want that answer fast.

It's just been realeased for first public use within the past several hours. This is one of those things that even after months of testing, the public is going to throw it curveballs they never thought of.

Hopefully it will get better with time.

You could just email me any questions you may have about anything. You see I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night and I'm feelin' pretty smart today.

Will keep trying it from time to time. I'd like more alternatives to Google.

I've used Wolfram for a lot of math reference in the past. This is pretty cool...

Yeah... totally useless... :p

Ummm, 42.....

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1242769447.jpg

Ian

Seems to me there was a search engine launched last year and I hear nothing....

That's pretty funny.

Like I said, I'm willing to wait and see if it pans out over time. Even Google kinda sucked in the beginning. (Remember WebBot, InfoSeek, and other now-obsolete search engines?)

I've developed products at the direction of my business analysts. They were object-oriented bliss. Pure design euphoria. And they were rejected by end-users because they were to complicated to actually use (something I warned about). Good design and high technology does not necessarily make a good end product.

The trick is always figuring out how to apply technology. If Wolfram doesn't do it, someone else will.

I thought those old time search engines like Webcrawler, Infoseek, were bought up by the bigger players (Yahoo, maybe even Google) so they could use the good parts (algorithms)of the search engines..

The old search engines were annoying in that they had way too much content/advertising/links on them. They missed the point that google hit- you go to google, and it loads instantly, because it is immensely simple. There is a box- you type in what you are looking for, and it searches for it, and returns clean and fast results. The superior algorithms that it used probably didn't even matter to most users- they were just sick of opening infoseek and looking for the box to type in their seach after waiting for it to load (remember, a lot of people were on dial-up, so reduced content made a big impact on load times).

I think a lot of people are missing the point of WolframAlpha... it's a COMPUTATIONAL engine, not a search engine.

There's a big difference.

For instance, just type in "moon". It figured out where I was (within10 miles), and then calculated the lunar path for my physical location, as well as the celestial configuration for my sky.


And Douglas Adams fans can be rest assured that yes, he's covered as well.


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1242773730.gif

I read on ArsTechnica that Wolfram relies on Wolfram employees to parse information sources and associate data with terms. If so, that seems like an unworkable system in the long run.

i tried it, found the information provided inaccurate..

For instance inhabitants for Brussels
They listed 1.09 million... which is wrong

For Lille they had 200000 something...

So they picked the number from Brussels region for Brussels city
and for Lille, they picked the city number for the city.

Either they take both for the city (140K and 200 K)
or they take both from the region (1.09 million and 3 million respectively)

Doesn't link to the source for information. So you can't conveniently check the answer or learn more about the subject.

I think this is the Rainman of search engines.