Has anyone checked out this new engine? When I read about it a couple weeks ago, I didn’t think much of it. Now that I’ve played with it a little bit, this seems like a pretty big step forward and I have to say I’m impressed. Link: http://www70.wolframalpha.com/ Try typing in a ticker or financial term like “options” Pretty cool…anyways…carry on then
yeah looks cool. something like this comes along and you wonder why nobody thought of it before. these guys get rich like that and the rest of us google their names.
needhelp Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > yeah looks cool. something like this comes along > and you wonder why nobody thought of it before. > these guys get rich like that and the rest of us > google their names. i think a lot of other people thought of it before but it’s a pretty difficult thing to properly implement. google is due to release something similar but more powerful called google squared this month - i think wolfram just wanted to beat them to the punch, but they may have rushed it because there are a lot of pretty simple queries that wolfram alpha can’t handle. or maybe wolfram alpha is just not meant to be very versatile. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/what-is-google-squared-it-is-how-google-will-crush-wolfram-alpha-exclusive-video/
Yes, it’s certainly not a google replacement right now, but I don’t think it’s really meant to be like google.
yeah. i guess the thing about wolfram alpha is that most of their results are reviewed by experts and then manually entered into the database with some sort of structure to easily parse it later. whereas google squared searches their huge existing cache and parses the results into a database structure on the spot. so if you go to wolfram alpha and type in golden retriever for example, it’s going to give you a bunch of expert-reviewed information about the breed once it has been plugged into the database. when you go to google squared and search for golden retriever, it’s going to parse a huge amount of data on golden retrievers and create a database on the spot consisting of the respective attributes of different golden retrievers.
As someone who has to do a lot of web searching at work I’m pretty stoked that they’re moving in this direction
This is an attempt at what we techies are calling the semantic web. The only problem is that we don’t have semantic data sources. So wolframalpha is hard coded for certain scenarios. Its not actually figuring out what something is, and figuring out what information you might want to know. That’s the difference. Thinking versus responding to pre-programmed possibilities. still, its cool, and a step in the right direction.
I went and did a search there. It looks groovy, but I can’t help feeling that it’s optimized to do specific kinds of searches, compared to Google, which is more general. Can someone pipe in with more detail on what Wolfram Alpha is really designed to do?
This seems to help answer my own question: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html