Slashdot Mirror
Test Driving the Wolfram Alpha
SilverMind writes in to note a blog entry at Byte Size Biology describing in detail a few hours spent with Wolfram Alpha (which we have discussed before). "After playing around with Wolfram Alpha for a few hours, I can safely say the following: it's different, it's incomplete, it's idiosyncratic, and it's funky cool. And no, it will not dethrone Google, nor does it aim to do so."
Maybe we can get the difinitive answer for the meaning of life? :)
Am I the only one getting a little sick of all these "Oh look there's so much buzz around Wolfram Alpha! Really, you are all very excited about it!" previews/sneak-peeks/tidbits/etc?
Until I can actual use it, I have exactly zero interest in this thing. Is there really any reason to propagate the marketing drivel?
sic transit gloria mundi
And what we will have? A computational data engine working with the biggest search engine. I, for one, welcome our new cybernetic overlord, Skynet, err, Wolfram Omega-Google.
Grey's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
How are they going to sell advertisements on this? How is this going to get funded?
Google makes money by selling search keywords and banners with random ads that their software thinks have something to do with the reason why you're viewing a page. I don't see this business model working for Wolfram; not unless a lot of people are interested in graphs and a statistical analysis on which TV set is the best value for money.
I'm not a marketing guy, maybe someone who is can think of something, anything?
The only thing I can think of is a subscription model, and I believe there is too much free stuff on the internet that I suppose is 'good enough' to leave room for subscription based content.
Is there a reason you restricted your screen capture video to certain countries?
Recently in the New York Times, there is an article about how YouTube is segmenting its reach, because it is expensive to stream their media to developing nations, that fail to return costs back to Yahoo in the form of advertising rates/revenue.
"In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/start-ups/27global.html
Ah ffs, what the hell do you think a 'general search engine' is ? Google's algorithms are seriously complicated too. I'll pretty much guarantee you Google use, or at very least have experimented with an algorithm which does very very close approximation to 'analysis of event shapes in e+ and e- annihilation' except it was implemented to run in scalable way on finite hardware. Also, quite aside from all that, why the hell wouldn't one compare it to google when people would be using it for the exact same purpose.
Without *actual* AI, their goal is completely impossible and their results will include millions of weird artifacts [or 'bugs' as far as users are concerned], so I predict that even in their chosen sub-domain, people will soon get frustrated and confused and return to Google.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
BTW, there was an update to the previous Wolfram Alpha vs Google post here. The author tried some of the searches suggested by Slashdot readers.