
Like Google, Only Much, Much Worse - soundsop
http://www.slate.com/id/2218594/pagenum/all/
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tophat02
Luckily, Wolfram Alpha has enough funding (and ego) behind it to survive for
at least five years. If they throw serious effort into it during all that
time, I'll bet we'll end up with something truly impressive (if perhaps not
life-changing).

The core flaw with Wolfram Alpha in my opinion is that it relies on curated
data. Such data takes time to source, verify, and translate into the necessary
target format.

I sincerely hope the same thing for Wolfram Alpha that I do with the Palm Pre:
that it'll get the market leader off its ass and spur true competition.

~~~
PhazeDK
Wrong, the core _advantage_ to WA is that it relies on curated data. That you
know it's from a verified source makes a world of a difference. That it can
produce _actual_ answers, not just averages or random tidbits, is essential.

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stratomorph
What Wolfram Alpha needed was to avoid the Spore-style overhype in the days
leading up to release. It was nearly inevitable that a product touted as "the
Google killer" would get slammed on the rebound, regardless of actual
performance. As long as they manage to avoid getting a unit of measure named
for them, or returning results about handing hamburgers to crying mimes while
the universe abruptly fails to exist, they'll be doing better than some.

~~~
pg
Yes, if they'd just described it as a free, online window into Mathematica for
ordinary people, everyone would be talking about how cool it was that it could
do such a huge range of calculations.

~~~
amichail
That wouldn't get as much publicity. Most people hate math.

~~~
vlad
pg submitted Wolfram's announcement of Mathematica 7 a few months ago, and
believes in launching early and then iteratively improving the product. I
think he might have been sarcastic.

I think Wolfram really does want as many users as possible. This is a type of
search engine, not an online version of Mathematica. Students may stay for the
step-by-step solutions to many types of math problems, but statistics on how
real people use and seek to benefit from such a product are what Wolfram must
really be after.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369056>

~~~
pg
I wasn't being sarcastic.

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tlrobinson
Stop comparing Wolfram|Alpha to Google! When did Wolfram ever say
Wolfram|Alpha was supposed to be anything like Google?

~~~
blinks
See also: <http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/24/>

If anyone comes out with a website that purports to provide quick access to
information, it'll inevitably be compared to Google (or Yahoo, or Live Search,
or whatever comes next). Slate's comparison is actually even pretty close; the
author took the examples provided and tweaked them slightly.

For example, "running 4mph 30 minutes 5'10" 160 lbs 40 year male" provides an
answer, but "golfing 4mph 30 minutes 5'10" 160 lbs 40 year male" doesn't. I
think that his conclusion was the most interesting part, about "the eternal
problem for any wannabe Google competitor[: ...] Google can easily co-opt such
improvements -- and suddenly everyone's got a better Google."

~~~
xiaoma
Yeah, Google already functions as a basic calculator and unit conversion tool.

Out of curiosity I tried seeing the the calories burnt were any different for
a 60 year-old man or 9000 year-old man. Apparently, they aren't.

[http://www28.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=running+4mph+30+minut...](http://www28.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=running+4mph+30+minutes+5%2710%22+160+lbs+9000+year+male)

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sachinag
Lookit, it's just a calculator. It's not a search engine. The phrase
"computational engine" dresses up the former as the latter.

That said, it's a badass calculator and with some guided navigation, it could
be really helpful. Mortgage refinancing, crazy sports stats, economic
indicators, healthcare costs - anything that bloggers graph, Wolfram|Alpha has
the ability to be really, really useful for. Wouldn't you like to tweak Nate
Silver's assumptions and see what would happen? Wouldn't you like to be able
to see if you could run a regression analysis to outwit PECOTA? You could wonk
off with Ezra Klein to see which healthcare cost reduction opportunities would
have the biggest impact on the deficit. And that's just off the top of my
head.

It's going to be the best new tool for educated and interesting commentary
since RedLasso, and no one will DMCA it to death.

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noodle
it kind of feels to me like this author willingly jumps into the exact same
snake pit he's accusing wolfram and other journalists of falling into.

wolfram alpha isn't a google killer. but to expect any small company to
somehow or another come up with a fully functional and completely superior-in-
every-way product, and to get it right on the first try, is naive at best.

google has been at search for years and years. wolfram might develop into
something that gives google a run. but to expect it to be a deux ex machina,
catching up to google's more than a decade of development and billions of
dollars sunk after only a year or two's worth of development, is fairly
stupid.

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vlad
Wolfram Alpha is much more interesting to me than Google was when it came out
(all Google had going for it originally was that it had no ads). Its
calculating abilities are also more impressive than Google's Calculator
feature has been at any point in time.

Wolfram Alpha will benefit from strategies that every other startup uses--
getting as many users as possible, monitoring what users appear to need, and
adding algorithms and data to meet the needs of their most popular queries.

I think Wolfram Research is hotter than Google right now.

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antpicnic
For some queries, Wolfram Alpha is excellent. As mentioned in other comments,
Wolfram's marketing sucks not the search engine.

Like all potentially disruptive products, it meets the needs of a particular
niche well, For example, try "population density" in W-A and Google. Be sure
to click on the "More" links to expand W-A's results. Amazing.

Over time Google may have a problem. I'm using Twitter for real-time search,
W-A where it's strong, and even using Live.com when Google doesn't return
meaningful results.

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tokipin
i think they are missing the point. the _vision_ that Wolfram has for this
service is probably not found in the product currently. but you can't get very
advanced things if

    
    
      1. you don't actually shoot for it
      2. you don't have a solid foundation on the basics
      3. you don't have lots of people testing your service
    

you're not going to get something great by just aiming because the problem
space for this kind of thing is massive. by shooting first you can get a
better aim

i suspect the hyping for it was more for #3 than people think

from this perspective i find the data argument weird because data is easy.
comparing it to Google is also weird because currently Wolfram Alpha is
clearly not an internet search engine in any caliber

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philelly
maybe wolfram wants alpha to do many of the things that we now consider
'googling;' maybe he doesn't. regardless, the author's point stands that alpha
doesn't seem to do too many things that are useful to me on a day-to-day or
even week-to-week basis. as a biologist, i consider the results of gene
searches on alpha to be, if not useless, then at least far inferior to what i
get in more specialized databases. do people in other fields also find this to
be true of their own searches?

this will be ideal for high school research papers (especially the edward
tufte-inspired graphics) and get some new people into mathematica, but beyond
that i'm not too excited about it.

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thras
Hmm. Try this Google search: "integrate 1/log(x)". Not very useful, huh?

Sorry, but Google and Wolfram Alpha are different beasts. Wolfram Alpha is
aimed at a much smaller audience than Google. That doesn't necessarily mean
that it can't be just as important one day -- the number crunchers get
everything useful done in this society, after all.

~~~
tjmc
On the other hand, try "4.7L/100km to mpg" in both. Alpha understands the
question and reformats it nicely but then doesn't calculate the answer. Google
just gives the answer.

~~~
tokipin
it works if you match the ratio (i.e. 100km/4.7L : m/g) but it probably should
understand that input and maybe have the result as blah^-1

