

Wolfram Alpha to Launch Live on Justin.TV - abstractbill
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23524/

======
programnature
In the meantime, they just released a screencast demo done by Stephen Wolfram.
It seems to be getting lost in the other news of the day but its pretty cool.

[http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/13/stephen-wolframs-
int...](http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/13/stephen-wolframs-introduction-
to-wolframalpha/)

~~~
ErrantX
one thing that strikes me how can it logically say "the gdp of france / italy"
should be interpreted as "the gdp of france _divided_ by the gdp of Italy"
that makes no sense to me.... clearly the context suggests that I want to know
the GDP of both countries side by side.

Actually im underwhelmed by it :( which is sad.

~~~
noodle
because it interprets "/" as mathematical division and "vs." as comparison.

they chose to use some specific, static operators so that you can do
interesting things with the data, instead of having it simplify your request
to what you "probably" want.

~~~
ErrantX
how many non-mathematicl non techy people (who realistically might want data
like this, say, for a school report) would use vs. rather than /. it's just
not natural english.

I understand your point: and I would have figured it out. But this is marketed
as an everydfay search engine - which it's not, it's an advanced search for an
encyclopedia :)

~~~
noodle
how many non-tech people would even assume that the search engine could
produce this type of comparative results without learning about it first? in
that process of learning, you learn how it works, and learn that /=division,
vs=comparison

i imagine if it turns out to be a common problem, they'll probably give you a
little reminder message about it. "if you're looking for data comparison, use
vs. instead of /"

~~~
fb
That little learning for technically literate (small percentage of users)
could be a show stopper for the rest. Many people are scared of even the
simple maths (sad but true).

------
pj
The success of WA is going to depend on the comprehensiveness of the data
sets. If the user goes there and wants an answer and the topic of interest
isn't in their dataset, then the user will revert to Google and wade through
the results and read text to find the answers.

It doesn't appear to me that WA is searching text based information at all,
rather these are tabular datasets that are carefully organized and queried to
provide the user information.

Google is just looking for strings of text and especially strings of text from
pages that have conformed to its requirements for SEO-ness leading to mostly
marketing type information, where as WA is looking for facts and numbers.

I think most of the world doesn't really care about the kind of results
they'll get from WA, but I don't care about that.

I think WA is a beautiful product. It isn't a google killer. Only those
without a valid understanding of information would call it a google killer.

And Google Squared has nothing on WA. G^2 is just an attempt to steal WA's
thunder. If Google would go to such extremes to hinder WA with their G^2, what
does that say about Google's confidence in their product?

For too long, google has ridden on a history of good search results, but
really, Google isn't much of an innovator. Most of their innovations were
actually acquisitions. Eric Schmidt himself has said Google is not an
innovator.

Here, WA is the innovator. Google is a me too and has been since their
inception.

~~~
wmeredith
This is contrarian BS. In terms of SERP quality it was like discovering
another dimension when web pages started being assigned value based on
incoming links vs. on-page content. It might have been all acquisitions after
they got rich off that, but it was a huge deal. I don't think it can be
overstated in the terms of how it's affected the internet, it changed
everything.

~~~
pj
It gave you a job!

~~~
noor420
they took our jobs!!!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFG2P-toC6k>

------
27182818284
The actual blog post at [http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/going-live-
and-webca...](http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/going-live-and-
webcasting-it/) says, "We’ll be making our first attempt to go live with
Wolfram|Alpha this Friday evening, May 15. We’ll start webcasting our
preparations at 7pm CDT (UTC -5)."

I don't know how I feel about a Friday night launch. On the one hand the
weekend allows for fixing problems, but on the other hand they are doing a
webcast and have been building publicity for more than a month.

~~~
TweedHeads
Tuesday is the best marketing day for everything.

~~~
quizbiz
why?

~~~
TweedHeads
Saturdays and Sundays are dead.

Fridays are almost bad as nobody will remember you next monday.

Thursdays gives you just one more day to digest your offering.

Now you have mondays, tuesdays or wednesdays left.

Mondays are catch-up days, everybody getting up to the minute with meetings,
planning, late tasks, errands, etc.

Wednesdays are good, very good, but no better than tuesdays, which gives you
three more days for penetration, attention, conversation and full digestion.

So, even if wednesdays are good, tuesdays are better.

------
stcredzero
He will probably make a ton of money implementing this sort of system for
corporations and their internal data.

------
justin
Excited to see it in action and get a chance to play with it myself!

------
natch
I'm betting we'll see big-time video streaming fail when this happens. The
people planning these events seem always to underestimate the bandwidth that
is needed.

~~~
abstractbill
I'm betting we won't. Justin.TV has supported more than 700,000 simultaneous
viewers already. As cool as I think Wolfram Alpha is, I don't think the launch
will get _that_ many viewers.

~~~
Mazy
I think he's referring to the bandwidth needed on the broadcast side. It's not
much, 300 Kbps up will do, but there are plenty of times where people do these
events on shared connections etc. Always frustrating.

~~~
abstractbill
Ok, that's a good point - it's always frustrating for us when people try to
broadcast on a connection that really can't handle it.

------
ErrantX
Big fail going with Justin.tv. A lot of us refuse to use it because they still
insist on spammy popups :(

A coup for justin.tv though.

~~~
abstractbill
Spammy popups? Definitely not to my knowledge. If anyone ever sees anything
like this, please do take a screen-grab and email it to me - bill@justin.tv

~~~
quizbiz
God, I love HN

