DISQUS

Daniel Tunkelang · 9 months ago

This could be as Cuil as Powerset! It's making me feel Dipsie already! Not sure he'll be able to flip it for $100M in this market though.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/1...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/mar/27/8

http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2006/02/17/d...

k · 9 months ago

Cuil never really got a fair chance. Maybe the black UI had something to do with it.
Anyway, I would like to give this one a try.
I would like to know if it's better than Yahoo Answers or Mahalo Answers, both are powered by humans. Maybe Wolfram needs to look at those two companies first when giving an answer.

Stu · 9 months ago

How about an example showing that it's actually better than Google? I put the exact same query into Google -- "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?" -- and it didn't merely "return documents that might contain the answer," it gave the answer to the question and provided its source.

Chris · 9 months ago

Cute - now try searching for any other atom on the periodic table.

Bob Agnes · 9 months ago

I did. It gave the answer for iron (FE) 56.

Bob A.

swag · 9 months ago

The problem with this talk is that only a small fraction of my Google use is to answer specific questions. Most of the time it's for finding other sites, references, open source software packages, procedural info such as a cooking recipe for preparing cornish hens or how to rip audio from a DVD, etc., what have you.

Meaning: the market for this is much, much smaller than Google.

galev · 9 months ago

Right. Google is a search engine, WolframAlpha is not.

s · 9 months ago

How many protons are in a Na22?

swag · 9 months ago

And anyone else think that Wolfram's photo here is an homage to George Costanza's bio on the Vandelay Industries corporate Web site?

MG Siegler · 9 months ago

Ha.

Mrs. Smith · 9 months ago

typo - will over s/b will offer

cyberiban · 9 months ago

This is the worlds first real contender for the Turing Test, if it delivers.

In some ways, it would be better than passing the turing test. If it can answer previously unanswered questions. Which appears to be a potential, it could actually be the first step toward furthering human understanding. A superior source of reference to other humans.

Maybe the singlarity gets just a little closer this May!

hypermark · 9 months ago

The API opens up some really interesting platform plays. Plug twitter into that and you have framing for all sorts of knowledge networking domains/spaces. I'm from Missouri on all of this stuff (game changers), but conceptually, a really fresh idea. Mechanical Turk, for real.

iphonedev.in · 9 months ago

"Nor does it resort to natural language to return documents, like Powerset does. "

"You ask it questions in a bar that looks very much like Google’s search bar, but it uses natural language to understand your question or even abbreviated notation. "

Don't they contradict ?

Any system whether Google, Powerset, Cuil or Wolfram Alpha cannot afford to not use NLP. In fact all of them use it to a certain extent.

Mark · 9 months ago

What do You think about www.coount.com - step by step online calculator?

Michael · 9 months ago

This is getting hyped wayyyy too much and much too quickly.

I can't help but be a tad bit skeptical.

Adam Singer · 9 months ago

Needs a better name.

John Wooten · 9 months ago

Type your comment here.

Miramon · 9 months ago

Going to have to wait till May, apparently, to see if it's any good. Wolfram has done good things, of course, but he also seems to have a very big head. IMO A New Kind of Science was about ten pounds too heavy for its actual content, and its pervasive lack of citation of living automata researchers -- who sometimes had already investigated claims said to be new and original in the book -- was extremely arrogant and annoying.

All prior "semantic search" that has supposedly been better than Google has not been, from PowerSet on down. I wouldn't get hopes too high for the Turing Test, cyberiban -- this thing will be lucky if it can even distinguish subject and object through NLP parsing (a principal PowerSet claim), much less figure out what the meaning of a complex query might be.

Bob Agnes · 9 months ago

I hope it's as good or better than advertised. Why not wait until we've had a chance to play with it, before spouting all of the negative comment. Wolfram is a briliiant hard working thinker. We should encourage people like him to keep reaching for the next breakthrough for everyone's benefit.

erdevs · 9 months ago

WolframAlpha is cataloging your criticisms and plotting its revenge...

znmeb · 9 months ago

I too am skeptical. Obviously, I'll have to wait until it's released to see what it can do, but what I've read about Wolfram Alpha so far seems neither feasible nor useful. And there's another issue -- transparency. This appears to have been a "secret project", not something developed as an open-source project by a world-wide community. If such a thing is feasible and useful, why has it not been built by the smartest people in the world, open source hackers?

Twine_watcher · 9 months ago

Maybe Nova Spivack should focus more on getting Twine's new nonsense ranking algorithm right before he hypes any Wolfram Alpha offering.

Twine's algorithm has people listed at #13 who've only posted 1 item and people who haven't actively used Twine in over six months in the Top 100 users.

Meanwhile, not a single user who HAS been posting thousands of items and is active has been included in the Top 100.

He's familiar with the dangers of hype. He claimed Twine has "explosive growth" and that proved to be mostly due to spambots whilst actual user engagement has dropped from a high of 16 minutes to 3 minutes.

Yup, he should work on fixing and delivering Twine's own smarts first before he goes and worries about how smart anyone else's solutions are.

Gabriel Weinberg · 9 months ago

Hey, also be sure to check out our new search engine, Duck Duck Go: http://www.duckduckgo.com/. More info about us (and why we're better/different) can be found at: http://www.duckduckgo.com/about.html.

We also have some semantic properties, e.g. ambigious keyword detection: http://www.duckduckgo.com/?q=apple, as well as have zero-click info, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Futurama.

Take care,

Gabriel Weinberg
Founder & CEO, Duck Duck Go

David Reiss · 8 months ago

Readers interested in some thoughts on Wolfram Alpha will might find my blog on the subject interesting. It's at

http://www.alpha-tips.com/alphatips/blog

Thanks!

--David (the blog's author...)

Vincent X · 8 months ago

Its nice that someone has put everything into this.
I'm sure it will be better or a vast improvement that in the past search engines.
Its good for our future.
Keep on getting better.
I hope you get very close to what you/we are trying to achieve.
Good luck.
I cant wait till it's Launch in May 2009.

Michael · 7 months ago

This is really cool , thank you for sharing ,

Funky Monkey ,

http://telcomworld.com

tiffany jewelry · 16 hours ago

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