The site looks interesting from the introduction. Wolfram Alpha is an upcoming search engine developed by Stephen Wolfram that answers factual questions that you plug into it.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html

5/14/2009 1:33:45 AM

we'll see. this has been buzzing for the last couple weeks. remember how much hype cuil got?

5/14/2009 9:03:17 AM

Maybe it will revolutionize search like Wolfram has already revolutionized science, with his masterpiece A New Kind of Science


---

I'm watching the screencast, and the results look very, very cool. However, it sounds like all the data is coming from an internal Wolfram database, and the results are tailored for specific types of data (dates, weather, chemistry). I think it's been shown in the past that manually created and maintained databases are not really sustainable (early Yahoo) or expandable to be useful in real world examples

[Edited on May 14, 2009 at 9:16 AM. Reason : .]

5/14/2009 9:05:04 AM

Based on the screencast it does not really seem like a replacement for Google, or even really a 'search engine' per se - their description as a knowledge engine seems apt.

I don't really expect it to handle popular culture, or many of the other things a search engine is typically used for.

5/14/2009 10:23:38 AM

Quote :

"Maybe it will revolutionize search like Wolfram has already revolutionized science, with his masterpiece A New Kind of Science"

is that sarcasm, I really can't tell

(I know this isn't a very qualified opinion, but judging wikipedia, I can't really see what impact the book has had at all)

I watched the demo. Very impressive stuff. I think I would use this on a regular basis, but I don't think it really has much to do with "search".

Quote :

"I think it's been shown in the past that manually created and maintained databases are not really sustainable (early Yahoo) or expandable to be useful in real world examples"

This is exactly what I'm wondering. If the data being presented has been found through some sort of crawling and aggregation, that's amazing. If it's being pulled from some internal database, how the hell is that going to scale.

[Edited on May 15, 2009 at 7:12 AM. Reason : hjlhljkl]

5/15/2009 6:51:41 AM

w/r/t A New Kind of Science.....

Let's just say that after being hyped almost as much, A New Kind of Science has had about as much impact on science as the Segway has had on transportation.

I don't mean to be giving Wolfram a bum rap here. All accounts point to him being a top-echelon genius, and I have never heard an ill word about Mathematica, although I've never used it myself.

But my first experience with Wolfram was all the build-up to ANKoS, and I even pre-ordered it and still have a nice glossy hardback sitting on my bookshelf. However, after reading the first couple chapters, in my own simpleton little mind, my conclusion was "this is ridiculous...." And not that I didn't understand it - I "got it" pretty well, but I thought it was bullshit. He took some interesting observations, but then extrapolated them into a huge worldview and tried to reinvent hundreds of years of scientific observation with a couple digital algorithms. After the official reviews came out, I think my personal viewpoint was justified.


So, I look at Wolfram Alpha with a jaded eye, one that sees Wolfram and Co. as brilliant thinkers, but maybe who's own self importance gets in the way of making practical observations and products. That being said, if WA delivers on what the screencast demonstrates, and if they weren't severely cherry-picking what kind of data and searches to show, then it does look incredible. That's assuming it's really as flexible as they claim, that the database of information is as vast as it would need to be to be useful on a daily basis, and tat the data is kept up to date, which may be the hardest part of all.

Ars has a pretty good first analysis
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/05/wolfram-alpha-set-for-launch-first-look-unveiled.ars

Quote :

"But even so, a Google-killer this is not. And it clearly doesn't aim to be, either, despite the inevitable comparisons. Structured vs. unstructured, facts vs. web pages For all its strengths as an answerer of questions, Google is still a search engine that takes in search terms and returns a list of relevant webpages. Some of those webpages contain facts and charts and plots, so that if you're looking for such things you can find them via Google. But ultimately Google is about finding web pages, in the same way that the card catalog is about finding books and articles. Alpha, in contrast, skips over the web pages part and gives you data, especially data that can be quantified numerically. Alpha seems especially useful for producing comparisons of how different data series have fluctuated over time. For instance, near the end of Wolfram's screencast, he shows a graph that reveals a curious inverse symmetry between the popularity of the names Andrew and Paul over the past few decades. So if you're someone who spends a lot of time looking at graphs and tables in your day job, Alpha will have a ton of appeal. In contrast, if you're someone who spends a lot of time online reading product and movie reviews, shopping, keeping up on the latest news, vanity surfing, cyber stalking, hunting for recipes, trolling for stock tips, reading celebrity gossip, and generally immersing yourself in the vast sea of largely unstructured information that Google makes instantly available, then you may not find much to interest you in Alpha."

5/15/2009 12:29:47 PM

I'll wait for the Beta.

5/15/2009 5:13:26 PM

going live in 15 minutes?

5/15/2009 8:47:03 PM

Does this mean I can use it to answer all the math problems I have no clue how to do anymore?

5/15/2009 8:50:05 PM

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?

works now. but the results aren't horribly impressive. it hasn't known what to do with most of my queries.

5/15/2009 9:56:00 PM

damn this thing is WebAssign's worst nightmare

5/15/2009 11:43:13 PM

i asked it 'what time is it' and it crashed my browser

5/15/2009 11:45:23 PM

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+airspeed+velocity+of+an+unladen+swallow

5/15/2009 11:59:51 PM

Down. The 'sorry dave, I'm afraid I can't do that' part amused me slightly.

[Edited on May 16, 2009 at 6:36 AM. Reason : .]

5/16/2009 6:35:40 AM

here's an early review. He mentions some highlights, but it's mostly negative
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/05/wolframs-black-box-a-biologists-take-on-wolframalpha.ars

Quote :

"I think that Wolfram's approach with this new tool is such that Alpha will largely be limited to producing information that, on a fundamental level, is trivial."

Quote :

"Given my initial experiences with Alpha, there seem to be at least three things that make it less useful than a general Web search. For one, Alpha is entirely dependent upon the ability of Wolfram's employees to draw in data and, unless Alpha earns the company a GDP-sized income, said employees will always be outpaced by the production of not only new data, but by new data storage formats. That necessarily means some searches will fail, which brings us to problem number two: it's not obvious that there's a way to make them fail usefully. A bad Web search typically brings up results that help you refine your search terms; a bad Alpha search returns nothing, and it's not clear that there's an easy way to fix that. But the biggest issue is that, in the process of creating the data store behind Alpha, all the context behind a number—who produced it, what were their methods, how was the raw data obtained, is the number actually relevant for a given analysis, etc.—is stripped (or, if it's there, you can't tell from the results). And, for most things other than trivial figures like density and melting point, the source and other contextual information is every bit as important as the number itself. This is why I said at the start that Alpha is only good for trivial uses."

5/18/2009 11:59:51 PM

^thanks for the link, this was my initial impression too (thought it looks like it's even more limited than we all thought )

5/19/2009 4:17:09 AM

search "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

5/19/2009 9:08:33 AM

Its a great and convenient boolean minimizer. I know that you guys have no interest in something like that though.

5/19/2009 1:29:57 PM

Quote :

"i asked it 'what time is it' and it crashed my browser"

After reading this, I felt compelled to try it.
It completely crashed Chrome.

[Edited on May 19, 2009 at 1:42 PM. Reason : .]

5/19/2009 1:41:58 PM

Well it knows how old it is, so thats a start.

5/19/2009 2:08:21 PM

Quote :

"Its a great and convenient boolean minimizer. I know that you guys have no interest in something like that though."

Unless I can use that on data I care about, it doesn't much matter what it's great at.

5/19/2009 2:24:55 PM

Its nice to know that you still excel at repetition

5/19/2009 2:30:55 PM

It's nice to know you still contribute nothing to discussions.

5/19/2009 2:41:44 PM

It doesn't know what to do with the majority of my search strings.

5/19/2009 3:30:59 PM

same

5/19/2009 3:37:56 PM

ha, i just used it to solve a simple Coloumb's Law problem from my hw.

but.. what did it really do? I guess it finds an equations and symbolizes it so you can assign values to teh variables.. then solves it.

I guess thats cool.. it makes an online calculator out of any equation.

5/19/2009 3:42:18 PM

http://www50.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=AAGCTAGCTAGC

Thats pretty impressive if its searching the human genome in real time. i dont really know what the significance is though. i'll have to ask the gf who's into that.

[Edited on May 19, 2009 at 3:48 PM. Reason : dfff]

5/19/2009 3:48:35 PM

If anything it's great for stat data:
http://www50.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nc+state+university

5/19/2009 5:09:18 PM

Quote :

"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

http://www50.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=naked+bitches

it will never be successful if you can't search for porn

5/22/2009 8:43:11 AM

^There's a joke there somewhere ...

5/22/2009 6:09:42 PM

this column puts its finger exactly on some problems in WA that will frustrate 95% of users, but who won't/don't/can't take the extra step to realize what an easy fix the problem could be.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html

WA, taking its hints from Google (like everyone does now), implemented a natural language search engine. In Google, this works well, because Google does full-text searches of billions of webpages, which themselves use natural language. WA, however, is just a bunch of huge, specially-built databases that require specific syntax to search, but they tried to put a natural language front-end on it and the program tries to translate your search into the database query language. When this works, it works well and the results can be stunning. But when your query fails, all you get back is a stupid error message and no clues at all about what you're supposed to do about it. The article proposes that, at the least, the simple act of presenting the types of data that can be searched to the user to select from on a failed query could resolve most queries. It's because you're sitting there, looking at the WA interface, and you know it has the data you want, but you can't figure out how to extract that particular data, and WA doesn't give you any fucking clues at all

Quote :

"And here we come to Wolfram Alpha. WA is not the same thing as Google. Everyone knows this. Everyone does not seem to realize the implications, however. Let me explain why the natural-language interface of WA is such an awful idea. WA is not a full-text search engine. It is a database query and visualization tool. More precisely, it is a large (indeed, almost exhaustive) set of such tools. These things may seem similar, but they are as different as popes and partridges. Google is not a control interface; WA is. When you use WA, you know which of these tools you wish to select. You know that when you type "two cups of flour and two eggs" (which now works) you are looking for a Nutrition Facts label. It is only Stephen Wolfram's giant electronic brain which has to run ten million lines of code to figure this out. Inside your own brain, it is written on glowing letters across your forehead. So the giant electronic brain is doing an enormous amount of work to discern information which the user knows and can enter easily: which tool she wants to use. When the giant electronic brain succeeds in this task, it has saved the user from having to manually select and indicate her actual data-visualization application of choice. This has perhaps saved her some time. How much? Um, not very much. When the giant electronic brain fails in this task, you type in Grandma's fried-chicken recipe and get a beautiful 3-D animation of a bird-flu epidemic. (Or, more likely, "Wolfram Alpha wasn't sure what to do with your input." Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!) How do you get from this to your Nutrition Facts? Rearrange some words, try again, bang your head on the desk, give up. What we're looking at here is a classic, old-school, big steaming lump of UI catastrophe. And does the giant electronic brain fail? Gosh, apparently it does. After many years of research, WA is nowhere near achieving routine accuracy in guessing the tool you want to use from your unstructured natural-language input. No surprise. Not only is the Turing test kinda hard, even an actual human intelligence would have a tough time achieving reliability on this task. The task of "guess the application I want to use" is actually not even in the domain of artificial intelligence. AI is normally defined by the human standard. To work properly as a control interface, Wolfram's guessing algorithm actually requires divine intelligence. It is not sufficient for it to just think. It must actually read the user's mind. God can do this, but software can't. "

7/14/2009 11:30:53 PM

Damn this would have been useful going through some EE classes

7/15/2009 12:10:07 AM