
Stephen Wolfram’s Introduction to Wolfram Alpha (screencast) - callahad
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/13/stephen-wolframs-introduction-to-wolframalpha/
======
DanielBMarkham
Couple of comments.

First, it's an awesomely cool idea. Congrats to the Wolfram team for pulling
it off so far.

Second, it's a freaking huge project. As much as they have, I can't help but
think they're only about a 100th of the way towards something that might be
truly comprehensive. Maybe a 1000th of the way.

Still -- kudos for setting it up. I sincerely hope it grows and becomes all
that it can be. It will definitely take web research to a new level.

~~~
fb
Impressive technology, BUT... I've just tried Wolfram Alpha with a preview
account, and I have to express my complete disappointment. It seems to me that
Wolfram Alpha is a classic example of geeks building application that is
useful for them but that is irrelevant to the other 99% of the world. And that
99% are the buying customers. I tried some usual web search phrases, and for
each of them "Wolfram wasn't sure what to do with my data". It even suggested
some alternative searches, but when I clicked, it still wasn't sure. Of
course, it was happy to analyse some sinus function for me, but imagine how
many people would like that? In my opinion, Wolfram will be an excellent niche
search engine for mathematicians, statisticians, and the geeks alike, but
nothing near Google in any respect.

~~~
rgoddard
This and Google are serving two different purposes. Google is an interface to
search the web. Wolfram Alpha is an interface to search their own database of
facts and relationships. When you use Wolfram Alpha you are doing a fact
search, not a web search.

------
lena
I am puzzled that people think this is a Wikipedia or Google killer. I think
it is much more disruptive to general websites. This project makes many
websites obsolete for many purposes. If people now want to know how many
calories are in a product, they go to a website that specializes in that
(directly or they find it through Google), but why do that if Wolfram Alpha
gives you that information quickly, and presented in a more interesting way?
The same goes for many of the topics he presented. Baby names are also popular
website topics, but none of the specialist babyname websites are as
comprehensive as a Wolfram Alpha search on different names.

~~~
thorax
I predict it doesn't obsolete anything except for power searchers and data
researchers.

People are still going to type "how many calories in a big mac" into Google
and get specialized sites that answer those questions fine. I don't think
they'll go to WA when they have a habit and good success rate with getting
those casual answers on Google. I think professionals and power users may use
WA in cases they know it will give them great responses, but I don't see it
changing many casual user habits.

What would be interesting is if WA actually caches search results and makes
them indexable by other search engines like we do with bug.gd (which is
similar in the sense that bug.gd is a specialized search service). This proves
to create a tremendous amount of traffic and could make the provided/refined
content much more likely to obsolete those niche sites.

~~~
ericb
I don't know about that. I think users will catch on. Think about Weight
Watchers, for example. I can get a whole nutrition label for the lunch I just
ate in one place at Wolfram alpha. With google, I have to add it up...

~~~
lena
I also think users will catch on. Maybe not immediately, but google and
wikipedia were also just for power users at first. The benefit is so great,
and it is so easy to use, that people will talk about it on forums and explain
how it works. They may not at first use it as their general knowledge tool,
but they will use it for the information they want most.

------
jsomers
If nothing else this is a gorgeous application -- it _looks_ great. And in
fact it looks like something I might use as often as Wikipedia (though not as
often as Google).

I can't wait to play around with it; some of these examples (nutritional
labels, the actuarial stuff, ISS location, etc.) are just dead cool.

------
huhtenberg
Wow. Don't know about you, but it seems to me that Wolfram to Google is what
Google was to Altavista. A principally different search paradigm that may
yield dramatic increase in a search quality. It's no longer a _web_ search,
but rather an _information_ search.

~~~
abossy
It seems like it fills holes that Google has rather than acts as a complete
superset of Google functionality. I use Google for a lot of the queries they
demonstrate, but I have to click-through and dig further to find my answer.
With Wolfram|Alpha, there is no need to dig. Yet, it doesn't return "regular"
ranked results, which don't require computation -- hence, it's not a superset,
and not a killer.

I can see Google responding with a similar offering, especially with their
impending Squares release. It'll be interesting competition flaring up in this
space.

~~~
wheels
I was tempted to agree there -- but that's the thing, whatever comes along and
replaces Google won't look like Google, and we probably won't even notice it
happening.

I don't think Wolfram Alpha is that. I think its goal is honestly too ...
computational, logical, factual ... to have the broad appeal of Google. But I
don't think that because something is fundamentally different than Google
means that it's not the fabled _Google killer_.

------
vicaya
You know what's more awesome than Mathematica? A free Mathematica with
toppings (curated, structured data.)

I hope they release a good API or just a formal query language, so I don't
have second guess the NLP crap.

------
auston
HOLY COW! WOW!!!!

I WOULD PAY $100 A MONTH FOR THAT.

I can think of at least 10 different scenarios where I would have (tried
to)used that and saved at least 2 hours per scenario.

My head just exploded - seriously.

------
amichail
Google will probably copy from Wolfram Alpha those things that are likely to
be of interest to many users. And it will do so using automated scalable
methods.

~~~
tlrobinson
Or Google buys Wolfram Research? I hope not, but how much would it be if it
happened?

~~~
programnature
Stephen has said many times that he will not be bought out.

The important thing to understand is that Stephen Wolfram built Alpha as his
personal "publication platform." He is going to use it to in effect "publish"
his ideas about NKS and computation in general into immediately useful form,
to the entire world. Rather than write papers.

~~~
mariorz
it would be very odd if he went around saying he's hoping that google and msft
will start a bidding war for his company.

~~~
programnature
Hehe, true. However you need to take into account sw's career. Its pretty
obvious if you look at his record that he is in this for the long term legacy.

Alpha isn't just some web startup looking for an exit. Its the culmination of
a life's work in computation, and the offspring of a 20+ year old company.

------
foppr
the real question now becomes where is the information WA is getting its
results from and how is that chosen as the premier source for a particular
query?

------
mojuba
Google has been doing simple things like unit or currency conversion, ticker
symbols, basic geographic facts, arithmetic expressions, etc for a long time
now. WA is nothing more than just a very, very advanced version of that, plus
charts. Well, it is certainly impressive at least in terms of human work that
made this amazing service possible. But from the engineering perspective...
don't know, not impressed that much.

I'm not sure who started the hype about WA as A.I. or Google killer or iPhone
smasher or an immortality pill, it's certainly less than all these things.
Just a pedantically well executed service. We'll see.

~~~
warfangle
The engineering used to simply parse the queries is amazing. It's lightyears
beyond Google's NLP.

~~~
mojuba
What exactly did amaze you in this demo?

~~~
kyro
One thing that amazed me was when he searched for that DNA sequence, and then
traversed up and down a chromosome. Mapping out the human genome has been done
for some time, but I've never actually seen any sort of interface or app that
hooks into this sort of data, and this does.

I can't tell you what revolutionary applications or mashups will make use of
this data, but I can definitely say I was 'amazed' when he did demo that part
of alpha. It's like I'm searching my body!!!

~~~
mojuba
warfangle said "It's lightyears beyond Google's NLP". I'm afraid there's
nothing NLP about WA, neither Google. It's just very basic parsing in both
cases, if you know what I mean.

Not only chromosome traversing, there were a few other impressive things in
the demo, but that's some level of structurization and formalization of
certain knowledge domains done by respective professionals. Good job. No, very
impressive, stunningly scrupulous job. But I see nothing revolutionary (edit:)
technology-wise.

~~~
sundeep
_I'm afraid there's nothing NLP about WA, neither Google_

You might be mistaken there, Google very much uses NLP , though at the backend
and not at the user interface.

Norvig himself said so ... I cant find to the exact talk where he said this(
It was one moderated by Nova Spivak,if I can remember correctly) but here's a
link to a TC article that discusses this
..[http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/18/googles-norvig-is-
down-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/18/googles-norvig-is-down-on-
natural-language-search/)

------
quizbiz
I think this is the search system Wikipedia has been needing to sort its data.
This is not a tool for discovering knowledge like Google is.

------
aneesh
This is the most persuasive argument for structured data I've seen so far.
Google's biggest limitation is that it can only help you find things that
someone has put on a webpage.

------
dmix
As interesting as the web application looks the APIs would take this to the
next level.

------
keefe
Absolutely, completely amazing! I hope they launch a solid API!! preferably in
RDF...

