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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."
If they can figure out how to get this thing to understand financial data, it would be quite useful. That whole area needs more theoretical work.
Machine understanding of financial data is tough. Partly because the data is willfully obfuscated. I once developed a system for turning SEC filings into XBRL (which is an XML representation for financial statements.) At one point, I had several hundred euphemisms for "Net Loss". The connection between financial reporting and reality is at times tenuous.
Accounting is fundamentally mis-designed. The problem is that some numbers are actual, some have tolerances, some are estimates whose actual value will be known at a future date, and some are estimates whose actual value will never be known. Numbers of all four categories are added, and the result is given as a number without a tolerance. That's just wrong. Accounting works that way for historical reasons; it was designed when arithmetic was expensive. Why it stays that way is more interesting, but beyond the scope of this posting. Because of these problems, machine understanding of traditional accounting data is very difficult.
(Back when I did Downside I was more into this, but when I started getting invited to accounting conferences, I realized I didn't want to get into accounting standardization as a field.)
Google at the time had a.o. AltaVista to contend with, at the time the number-one search engine. It was set up by some college students in their dorm room, who had a better idea about searching/indexing web pages, and managed to implement that idea. Then it went live from a single computer for their friends. Who told their friends, and soon the whole campus used them, etc.
Google never advertised their service, it was pure word of mouth. They just got better results than the competition. And they got started of course in a geek environment, so the first word got out and spread quickly.
Good chance that the "next Google" starts up just like that. Hell, I bet The Pirate Bay started up that way. Craigslist did so at least - just a guy called Craig who started a local classifieds page for friends and friends of friends.
Yes the stakes are huge but just throwing money at the problem generally won't get you far, I would say good chance it gets you doomed even as big money often takes away the focus from the innovation that is needed.