Wolfram Co-Founder On Why Wolfram Alpha Doesn't Need to Kill Google

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-05/gray-versus-grouse

by tlrobinson • 17 years ago

15 5 17 years ago

quilby• 17 years ago

I don't see a product like Alpha succeeding all by itself. As he says alpha is made to answer questions that involve all kinds of 'primitive' calculations (I call them primitive because it can only use data that it already has in its DB). And out of the many queries that I use Google for every day how many are such? Close to 0.

Its still a nice product but its not much more useful than Mathematica right now. In my opinion their biggest competitor, True Knowledge, is moving in the right direction. They have a new Firefox addon which will add data obtained from True Knowledge to the results page of your Google searches. Thats whats going to succeed. A hybrid of a search engine and an answer engine. And maybe one day once answer engines get smart (not any time soon- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering#Issues ) we will be able to replace most of our Google searches with Alpha queries.

noelchurchill• 17 years ago

So maybe WA will be Google's next big acquisition.

chanux• 17 years ago

WA had links to Google queries. So I knew they are not against Google.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

It just reeks of phoniness. Look, here's the query he wrote in the article:

http://www64.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+...

Sure enough, it works. So modify it oh-so-gently:

http://www64.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+...

And it's utterly confused. It's the same frickin' thing, but simpler. Oh, but it helpfully suggests this:

http://www64.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+one+ounce...

Which also confuses it. Why suggest something that you're going to fail on?

quizbiz• 17 years ago

Are we still talking about this? Providing a similar service does not mean they are competitors.

Wolfram Co-Founder On Why Wolfram Alpha Doesn't Need to Kill Google

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