Comments on: Why Wolfram Alpha is a Game Changer

By: jdrumgoole

jdrumgoole — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:48:35 +0000

Stephen,

Wolfram Alpha is an “and” function. You can use it and google to find your answer. If you want to calculate your own body mass index, Alpha is best, if you want to find out what is meant by body mass index google is best. Use of one does not preclude the other.

By: Stephen Murphy

Stephen Murphy — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:26:20 +0000

Wolfram definitely looks good, as long as I want a highly powerful web-based scientific calculator. The issue with it is that the assumption seems to be that most people on the internet are looking for an answer to a question – what about the people who want to find websites that are highly relevant to the subject matter they are interested in? Not everyone wants an answer on a plate – some of us would just like some help finding the answer for ourselves.

By: jdrumgoole

jdrumgoole — Mon, 18 May 2009 08:24:17 +0000

I agree, but its not a a search engine, its a compute engine. In this respect it replicates neither wikipedia nor google. However Google should have more to fear than wikipedia as it most definitely “plays” in Google’s space more than Wikipedias.

By: Merrill

Merrill — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:39:43 +0000

Joe, Wolfram Alpha is great but keep in mind that does not index any web pages! It is a competitor to Wikipedia more than Google.

By: Fluffy Links - Monday 18th of May 2009 « Damien Mulley

Fluffy Links - Monday 18th of May 2009 « Damien Mulley — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:02:14 +0000

[...] Joe on Wolfram Alpha. [...]

By: Clunky Flow » Wolfram Alpha: Daring to believe

Clunky Flow » Wolfram Alpha: Daring to believe — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:40:49 +0000

[...] Bonus link: Joe Drumgoole has a (kinda) Top 10 on why this is a game changer in Silicon Valley answering the ‘meh..sure won’t Google just buy it or bury it anyway’. Fave line from the top “Alpha.. generates new information from data as opposed to slavishly returning the mob results that Google co….” [...]

By: David Doran

David Doran — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:45:27 +0000

Anyone who’s used Mathematica for a bit knows how incredible it is. The difference with Wolfram is he commits to projects without compromise. As incredibly hard as it is, you can input mathematics in just about any notation (Mathematica, traditional maths, linear) and it understands perfectly – and then you can get the output in any format.

From what I’ve seen of using Powerset, the difference here (besides obviously the computational focus of alpha) is that Wolfram Research have tackled a very hard problem and been unrelenting in their efforts (after all, entering all that data takes time and energy) where as Powerset and the pseudo-natural-language search engines are _partially_ solving a hard problem, but not well enough.

Dave

By: jdrumgoole

jdrumgoole — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:46:30 +0000

I suggest you take a look at mathematica. Map-Reduce requires an algorihm to make it useful. Mathematica has encoded most of the worlds knowledge of maths in an extensible engine.

By: FooBarBaz

FooBarBaz — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:39:12 +0000

It’s not clear what the Mathematica compute engine brings to the above party that a Map-Reduce framework is incapable of. Perhaps it’s just Wolfram’s golden hammer?