
After Being Upstaged By Google, Wolfram Alpha Fires Back With A Leaked Screenshot - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/28/after-being-upstaged-by-google-wolfram-alpha-fires-back-with-a-leaked-screenshot/
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andrewljohnson
I think innovations in search will be largely about interface and about
relevance. It's not who has the most, or the best data, because it's not
really that much of a technical challenge to build a big search index anymore.
So, I think that Wolfram could be on the right track, because this seems to
try and expose data that Google doesn't, in ways it doesn't.

The challenge is providing useful and relevant snapshots of that data to the
user. In this area, Google continues to innovate. Maps, images, video, reddit-
like search, your name it... Google is always looking for new ways to reveal
good data to people. And Google is definitely good at producing relevant
searches for people's phrases and words.

Maybe Wolfram's new search engine will have a good interface, and provide
relevant results. I certainly wouldn't put it past them, and I doubt this will
be a Cuil flame out. Though I do tend to agree with the sentiment that talking
about something before it is released is suspicious. A good search engine
sells itself.

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alain94040
It's funny how none of you even question what a search engine should be.
Everyone gave in to the concept that you want to find web pages.

Wolfram is the first one to say that you need an answer engine. The web has
data, you want answers, not necessarily an URL.

When you discuss indexing, you imply keyword matching. That has nothing to do
with Wolfram Alpha. If anything else, this discussion was a great way to
question conventional wisdom.

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andrewljohnson
I find it hard to believe that keyword matching has nothing to do with Wolfram
Alpha.

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ph0rque
I will be really impressed when I can ask a question like the following:

"What is the historical cost of solar per watt for the last 30 years?"

and get a meaningful answer, which right now is scattered across various press
releases, journal articles, etc.

I don't really care who answers it, google or wolfram alpha.

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vaksel
What unit of measurement is "solar"?

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litewulf
I'm going to guess he asked "how much does solar cost, per watt..."

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vaksel
This is the first clue that Wolfram is not competing with Google

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jpwagner
I know! It's like thinking that Ducati competes with Amtrak. Sure their
products have similar objectives, but their function, specs, market, etc are
completely different.

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frossie
Okay, can you provide a bit more detail besides the analogy? For example,
reading one of the links referenced in the OP, it says

 _"It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like
Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the
Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to
retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha
actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions
that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many
protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in
Seattle?”_

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfram-alpha-
computes-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfram-alpha-computes-
answers-to-factual-questions-this-is-going-to-be-big/)

But Google does some of those things indirectly at least. For example, in a
Google Spreadsheet I can type

=GoogleLookup("hydrogen", "number of protons")

and the cell returns one.

=GoogleLookup("Timbuktu", "country")

returns "Mali"

and

=GoogleLookup("Seattle", "rainfall")

returns "36 inches".

Now I don't know whether there is some syntax to do these from the main
search, but it seems to cover some similar ground. I am guessing since
everybody is very excited about Wolfram Alpha that there must be more than
this, or qualitatively different.

[Edit following comment below: I am not saying they are competing, I was
asking whether the same underlying technology is powering both, for example
with Wolfram being a more complex version of whatever GoogleLookup is doing,
or whether the algorithmic approach is fundamentally different. I will admit
to not watching the 2 hour webcast and looking for a quick answer]

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vaksel
I wonder how many people actually use Google Lookup instead of just opening a
new tab and searching Google

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jpwagner
GoogleLookup is useful sometimes. If the rainfall changes in Seattle, your
spreadsheet would update...

Although another proton won't likely be discoverd in a Hydrogen atom.

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gojomo
Is today's Alpha webcast archived anywhere?

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gojomo
Now on front page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=584477>

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quellhorst
They are already failing since they give you a search box that doesn't work.
When it finally does work, I probably will be trained not to type into that
box.

