WolframAlpha a Google Killer? Not!
Like many of you, I have been reading some of the hype about WolframAlpha as if this new website is a potential Google killer. Where in the world do these fools come from? Anyway, I admit that I had to try it out for myself.
First of all, WolframAlpha is not a search engine, it is a computational engine. So far, this means that you can input “1 banana and 2 apples” and you can find out how many calories and what is the vitamin content. Cool, but what does that have to do with content search ? Nothing.
You can also input “IBM Apple” and get a few comparisions of the companies stock and other ratios, which is cute, but crude compared to financial sites. You can also input “new york” and get almanac statistics like population, elevation, and weather. Big deal.
You can input “10 times 10″ and you get 100. Wow, ROTFL.
So basically, WolframAlpha is an online calculator, quick reference guide and almanac, with a few other similar features. It is far from being a “Google Killer”, which makes me laugh just to think about it.
What a funny world we live in.
Filed under: Cyberstrategics
I take it you saw the thread on CEP forum about Wolfram Alpha. I seriously doubt Wolfram Alpha will be a competitor. then again I’m bias.
Hi Peter,
Great to hear from you!
I have not been reading or participating in the CEP Forum, so I did not see that thread. I don’t visit the CEP Forum as much as I used to, and rarely read anything there.
These days, I am more interested in what is happening with Mahout, Hadoop, MapReduce, EC2, CloudFront, S3 and other evolutionary areas where events can be processed, either in real-time or batch profiling, as a service by various methods.
If I was younger and not so busy golfing, swimming and playing sports in the tropics, I would be more active in those user communities, not the CEP/EP community. Unfortunately, that community has evolved to be an insular group of self-promoting vendors with a common purpose to sell software and discourage critical thinking, not solve complex problems. The most vocal companies are those with venture capital pressure, not scientific expertise.
The good folks working Mahout, for example, are doing things far more interesting than any self-described CEP vendor, so I don’t spend much time in “CEP vendor land” these days.
Yours, Tim
I think this has a lot of potential to replace or at least augment google for a lot of searches. For instance, I currently use google to do my basic conversions (dollar to euro, celsius to Fahrenheit). wolfram research does this, but it also gives you the formula and related information.
If I want the coordinates of some town, I can get them by googling *and then* going to the link (if for instance, Wikipedia has this information, I can click on that link). But Wolfram Alpha sends it straight up.
Now I think this isn’t a Google Killer in a financial sense, because Google doesn’t really make money on these kinds of searches.
I think I will be using it more often, and as I come up with uses, I’ll follow up here.
Hi Otheus!
Great to see you here. Thanks for commenting!
I agree that WolframAlpha can be useful. For example, I regularly use Google for currency conversions or FedEx tracking I think it is nice I can type a FedEx tracking number into a Google tool bar and Google knows it is a FedEx number. I also like typing in 100 dollars to yen (on Google) and getting a fast conversion. Let’s try:
Google 100 dollars to yen
100 U.S. dollars = 9 618.15908 Japanese yen
WolframAlpha: 100 dollars to yen
Lots of nice info, including the Taiwan dollar, but the query took at least 20 times longer.
I think Google will just keep getting better and better. Many of the features appearing in WolframAlpha will find a home in Google, as time passes.
Cheers.
It is a bit disappointing to go to Wolfram Alpha and type:
1 year libor
and get this result:
Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.
go to google and the first hit is:
http://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/1-year-libor.aspx
….
I’m getting a good laugh. Clearly Wolfram Alpha isn’t a search engine and likely will never beat google. As much as some people might think it’s going to happen, I really doubt it.