

Wolfram Co-Founder On Why Wolfram Alpha Doesn't Need to Kill Google - tlrobinson
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-05/gray-versus-grouse

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mynameishere
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+...](http://www64.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+one+ounce+sugar+and+one+cup+butter+and+one+milky+way+bar)

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

[http://www64.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+...](http://www64.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+one+ounce+sugar+and+one+ounce+sugar)

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...](http://www64.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=calories+in+one+ounce+sugar+and+one+ounce+sugar)

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

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

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

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

