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A Look At the Wolfram Alpha "Search Engine"
An anonymous reader points out a ReadWriteWeb piece on an hour-long demo of Wolfram|Alpha (which we discussed at its announcement). Stephen Wolfram does not like to call it a "search engine," preferring instead the term "computational knowledge engine." It will open to the public in May. "The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next 'Google killer' from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype — though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a 'Google killer.' According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information."
...with their web-crawling keyword-sculling technology, but it's only normal that someone else was researching what to ~do~ with all the data. IE (data analysis for human comprehension) and Google would make one fierce - and useful - blend.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
It took Mathematica many years to become even marginally correct and useful. If Alpha proceeds at the same pace, it won't have any impact at all.
FTFA:
...according to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).
5 *million* lines of Mathematica? How many code monkeys does he have working for him?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
The Hype: The singularity is here people and Wolfram is our prophet!
The Demo: It's like a search engine but not as good, so he doesn't like you calling it that.
The Product: I can't wait.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Google won't be killed until someone perfects an AI that you can have a search 'conversation' with, who can understand goddamn context and intelligently narrow down, find relevant articles that don't contain your keywords, etc. Kinda like the librarian from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" novel, but more powerful.
The main reason no one will beat Google until then is that Google is extremely wealthy and can outspend you as it continually perfects information sorting itself, not to mention buy any technology that comes close to threatening it. If you really developed a Google-killer and presented it to the world, do you also have the stones to turn down, say, $100 million? I don't think so, it would take you probably 20-30 years to make that on your own, if you're lucky, with the search field full of competition and Google's mature business-plan in place. Even the days of Alta-Vista were essentially the Cowboy West, unsophisticated and without any proven business plans. Google walked in and owned right away, then discovered how to make money off search when no one else was.
Even then, the founders of Google tried to sell their brilliant search idea not for $100 million dollars, but for $1 million dollars, and there were no takers. They were forced to go it alone. If someone had offered them $500,000 they probably would've taken it and ran.
Although, if you really do develop an AI, there'll be a billion more profit opportunities than search, that's peripheral. An AI can do menial labor far better, faster, stronger than a human. What happens when McDonalds is staffed solely by robots. That would be pretty damn cool actually. They work for the price of electricity, maybe we can get the price of a cheeseburger back down to $0.25 :D
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Or, ya know, not.
I'm not calling Wolfram a big academic fraud with an even bigger opinion of himself, but so far we've seen no evidence that he has done anything.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This is the first time I've ever heard about it and I usually check technologically acclimated news sites. Is this a "Google killer" like Cuil was?
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
Or, ya know, not.
I'm not calling Wolfram a big academic fraud with an even bigger opinion of himself, but so far we've seen no evidence that he has done anything.
I said it could work. ;)
So far there's no evidence in either direction. But it's more fun to stay optimistic.
.: Max Romantschuk
I'm still waiting on a decent search engine that supports perl regular expressions
You'll be waiting for a long time. It's impossible to index a database for matching via regex, therefore searches on such an engine would be inordinately expensive to process.
Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." [...] Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case).
Your "uncle's uncle's brother's son" could well be your father.
Why it stays that way is more interesting, but beyond the scope of this posting.
Would it be entirely inaccurate if I could summarize that with the single word "greed"?
Meh, financial analysis is tough because it's a chaotic system that monitors itself. Upon monitoring itself, it changes the system. Sure, you might be able to model the data, but models are just simplifications of the actual system. And this sux because the minutia of each possible data point could have wide-sweeping implications for the whole system. You come up with a tool to measure the whole system (because it's not simply the sum of its pieces), you'll be king of the world.
Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.
So this means we just get the straight answer in the future. No more thinking for yourself, no more understanding where the answer comes from, no more critical thinking about the validity of the answer. E.g. TFA mentions that the answer to how many Internet users there are in Europe includes the factoid that there are only 93 in Vatican City. Is this true? Well it must be because Alpha gives it, right? Or maybe it is not true? But why would it be not true and what would be a more realistic number? How many people do really live/work in Vatican City, for example? How does this relate to the number of Internet users?
An encyclopedia search will give one heaps of background information that is highly relevant to the question, and gives a lot of understanding about the answer. It makes the answer more than just a number.
For example if one would look up the question "what is the national flag of the USA", the answer is of course "the stars and stripes", and may include an image. But now I happen to know there is a story behind it: why this number of stars, and that number of stripes, and those colours. I bet this will be in Wikipedia's answer but not in Alpha's answer.
Search engines like this sound really interesting to me, and can be very useful, though it will never replace textbooks and encyclopedias. There is just so much more to answer to a query than just a straight number. And there are so many questions that can not be answered that way, such as "why is polcarbonate so much more temperature resistant than polyethylene?" for example. The full answer to this question includes details about the chemical make-up of the two polymers, and how polymer chains work. That is what textbooks are for.