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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."
What role will cellular automata play in this, and will this also define the basic nature of universal mechanics?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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"
It seems they are not trying to index the web, nor trying to replace Google.
Instead they are trying to compute knowledge-worthy data from a small subset of the web using natural language algorithms.
Queries like "What is the melting point of iron?" are processed and answered, instead of just trying to score pages based on keywords.
This could really work.
.: Max Romantschuk
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.)
This blog post reads more like a marketing piece written by a shill, and if there is any hype, it just seems like it's just self-delusion or just wishful thinking at this point.
Any search engine query and corresponding results can be manually optimized and tweaked to quasi-perfection. In fact, that's the exact recipe many of the now defunct search engines were using a while ago. They would optimize the hell out of a couple of queries or use case scenarios, and then they would fall in love with the layout and content of their contrived results. And then, when the users didn't use the search engine the way the developers wanted them to use it, the developers tried changing the behaviors of their users instead of trying to change their search engine. For the most recent example of this, of actually one company that still had money to waste a year ago, think back to the ask.com commercial where they tried to teach us about the *cool* ajax feature of previewing web sites. Not that this feature was bad per say, but if it was any good, or groundbreaking in any usable way, users would be telling each other about it -- they wouldn't need to be educated about it -- at such a large expense.
And the same goes for the tone of this blog post was written in. It was written from the perspective of a shill, or from the perspective of the company itself, but not from the perspective of an actual user. Personally, I don't want to know about the supposed hype or marketing-speak from the developer's own mouth, I just want to know how useful it's going to be for me. And I don't want contrived examples, I want one or two random example from the (supposedly independent) blogger himself (if possible). And I don't want an actual screenshot of the search box, I want the actual search box itself. Am I only one who tried clicking on it? And if you're going to give me the screenshot of something, give me the screenshot of the search results page (at the very least) and not just a verbal description of it.
Which brings me to my last point: Show. Don't tell. And if there is one thing that Google does well, it's that they don't try to prematurely hype their nascent lab products. They release them first, then they see if the users fall in love with their creation (or not), which is rather a hit-or-miss proposition and a long iterative process. So don't tell me about a fancy search engine, if it's not even out for a public trial yet. I want to try it. I don't want to be told about it.
If Google does no evil and someone kills them, doesn't that then make the killer evil?
I don't know if I like where this is going.
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.
Do I have to remind everyone how annoying it is to search for technical documentation for something vaguely Linux-related, only to find the first 30 hits are various forums with more or less clueless newbies discussing installation difficulties and the syntax of apt-get?
Gods yes. And not to mention that 80% of them are from 2006 or earlier.