
Wolfram Alpha vs. Google: Answers to Your Queries - buluzhai
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23495/
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ErrantX
Wolfram wont take off unless:

\- it nails _every_ common query every time in a useful way (i.e. stuff people
want like: where can I see X film in Y city?)

\- it expands beyond the scientific borders. So far it appears only
statistical queries and some science stuff works really _well_. I know they
say pop stuff is "coming soon" but I dont buy it. The task is too big to
organise that kind of data in the way they seem to be doing.

Basically I think Wolfram has ignored the process which has got Google to the
top. Google apprach search from the "index and link everything and then
analyse words to find good matches". Frequently it is wrong, but often that
can eb overcome by adding or tweaking the wording once or twice. Wolfram is
going to analyse your questions - which is fine but suggests that if you dont
get the right data small tweaks to your wording are simply going to result in
the same data. They are also trying to provide a nice page of data on all
sorts of topics. Which is nice (and for advanced statistics it appears to beat
anything else on offer) BUT Wikipedia has huge archives of data which can be
recovered just as easily. Wolfram perhaps covers the complex data
relationships base fairly well (though this article suggests far from
perfectly) but for basic data (which one assumes is it's main target) it is
probably pointless...

AKA I think there is a lot of Hype. But no delivery.

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euroclydon
Maybe Wolfram can analyze your question, and then turn it into a google
search.

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robryan
We should see this for what it will most probably be. One step on the path to
creating a search engine which understands and computes your question based on
the sum of all knowledge on the internet.

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gruseom
The hype may turn into a backlash if a few embarrassingly wrong answers get
well known.

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iamcalledrob
They are not going to compare well, because they are NOT designed to be the
same thing, or find the same data.

Stop comparing them Apples to Apples, people.

~~~
j2d2
Apples and Oranges, but still fruit.

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jodrellblank
This highlights a problem, which is that if I want to ask about cars, I know
people who like cars, and if I want to know about recipes I know people who
can cook.

And if I want useless help, I ask someone who gives me a completely confident
reply that may have been made up on the spot.

If Wolfram Alpha tells me an answer about cars, should I trust it? If it then
tells me another answer about cars, I can't build on my feeling of trust
because it may have used a different source. If I ask it about constellations,
then what? Is it bluffing me? Is it pulling irrelevant information? Without
knowing the answer already, I can't know.

At least a classic search engine can point me to a source, and I can decide on
a source-by-source basis how much trust to give, and with lots of results I
can compare answers between them.

