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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."
The whole article was an advert for Google. The W|A search engine has nothing to do with the kind of problems solved by the Google algorithm so why does every article about it seem to bring up Google on every other line??
Quote :D
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
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The most important question is however.
Will a BIg Mac still taste like regurgidated cardboard?
Think I'm biased? Well maybe, I plan on going through life without EVER setting foot in a McD's (That includes drive through's). What they describe/offer as food does not interest me in the slightest and NO, I don't work for a competitor.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Might I suggest, dear Anonymous Coward, some serious reeducation?
I think in an established market, simply evolving the product slightly isn't enough. The industry leaders will just catch up & you'll end up at most cannibalizing the existing competitor market share & perhaps at most, if you are lucky, some of the market share of the leader.
Either you've got to find/create a new market (that has sufficient room for growth) or create a a product so much better that the industry leaders just can't recreate in a matter of 6months to a year (maybe 2 if you are lucky). If you can't, either there's not enough money to be made or the industry leaders will just leverage their existing market share & capital to provide the new service (or you might be lucky & they incorrectly ignore the new market).
With a company the size of Google, competition is difficult in something like the search space, especially given that their real business is advertising for the most part. So your search engine needs to be good, but equally as important it needs to be good for advertisers so that you can generate money.
It'll be hard for you to compete since Google will get much better ROI on their search engine than you can on yours using AdSense (or any other advertisement provider unless you strike some kind of great deal) since Google gets all the money for advertisements on their site.
Google is also now a giant. They get a huge stream of income & have lots of smart people to throw at a problem like this. They also have a lot of money, so they can lose money on a competing project for a while for the sake of offering competition.
If by "IE", you mean "Internet Explorer", then I don't see your point. Internet Explorer is merely a way to present web pages. Google has duplicated the essential features of IE with Chrome. They've also duplicated the other Microsoft products like their OS, database, and the Office suite. Microsoft really doesn't have much else to bring to the table.
"IE (data analysis for human comprehension) and Google would make one fierce - and useful - blend"
Perhaps, but the question is: Will it blend?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I originally thought that was what he meant, but it didn't make sense in that context. I think he probably meant "Internet Explorer", Else the sentence is horrifically mangled. The latter never happens on Slashdot. QED (Quantum ElectroDynamics, of course).
because a beautiful girl broke my heart that day. but thanks for asking