

Wolfram Alpha Isn't Google, So Stop Comparing Them - astrec
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/wolfram-alpha-isnt-google-so-stop-comparing-them

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aaronsw
Nor Wikipedia. If you need to compare Wolfram Alpha to something, compare it
to Freebase.

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ErrantX
link w/o the splash advert: <http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1282717/print>

Anyway, I think this has been well hammered home by now - excpet the media are
still plugging at the theme (as I keep saying I'm convinced that is Google's
doing and _very_ clever of them too :))

One thing that _has_ occured to me is that we were wrong to compare it to
Wikipedia too (which I spent weeks doing... :( oops). WA is certainly not in
any state to compete with WP either, yet; when you consider the wealth of
information available on WP.

WA is really an academic and research tool: they have got some good hype from
the "vs Google" and "vs Wikipedia" media coverage but I suspect that it will
die off and wont last 6 months. It will have it's uses (if I were a
student/academic/journalist etc. I imagine it would become as useful as Google
and WP to me!) but.. well.. that's it...

And how do they monetize it?

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stcredzero
_except the media are still plugging at the theme_

So much of our mainstream-facing tech media are infuriatingly bad! What can we
do about this? Maybe David Pogue should set people straight.

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roc
They're certainly not the same. But when Google debuted, it wasn't the same as
Yahoo either. And many of Yahoo's categories were superior to Google's early
search results.

Definitions aside: If Alpha works, it -will- impact how people use Google. If
people change how they use Google, it -will- impact Google.

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gustavo_duarte
But only for a very small value of impact.

What percentage of Google queries do you think might eventually become WA
queries? I'd say easily < 1%. I see the two as very complementary, not really
competing.

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jasonlbaptiste
Amen. Here's my question from the spin/marketing/PR perspective:

They got press because everyone loves talking about a Google killer. Freebase
killer just doesn't get you the same type of hype.

Was the hype created due to:

a) Wolfram knew that people would talk more about a google killer and
positioned it this way. b) The press mis-interpreted what the product did and
wanted it to be a Google killer, even though it's NOT. c) A combination of
both.

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axod
This quote from Conrad Wolfram was probably something to do with it IMHO

“It does at first glance look like a normal search engine, but in fact we have
10,000 computer processors behind the scenes working out an exact answer. It
will really change the way we get our knowledge, and we hope it will change
the way people search online.”

