New Search Engine scheduled to launch tonight

[Inchworm]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3879209

Thought I'd share here. We can all stress test the hell out of it :P

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

:woohoo:

[sam sarrha]

1. is there any association with WolfRam & Hart.??

:hide: :yoiks:

[Syrinx]

2. just tried it out a few times

I'm mostly getting "wolfram/alpha doesn't know what to do with your input."

[Why Syzygy]

3. It isn't much of a "search engine"

unless we modify the term. If you use the "search the web" link, it searches google, msn or yahoo.

It IS a perfect geek tool, which is what you might expect from a scientist.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

When I searched for "ACIM", wolfram gave me a page for Achim,Lower Saxony,Germany, no other option.
Google gives: Results 1 - 10 of about 799,000 for acim.
http://www.google.com/search?q=acim

Looks like it might be useful for some things and maybe fun. But no way will it replace google search.

[RoyGBiv]

4. It's not intended to ...

...at least not at this stage. Part of the innovation though is in the parser. Google's search technology has been revolutionary, but it is becoming stale in the way it is utilized. If you know the various features that aren't readily apparent, you can get a lot more out of it than just by throwing terms into the search box, but finding what is relevant to what you intend to find is sometimes a challenge, especially with the way they weight the results they give you.

Lexis-Nexis, Infotrac, etc. wouldn't replace Google either, but they're used for far different purposes. They've been around longer, but of course they are paid services and have very basic search technology, but they offer the advantage of specialized searches for a specific purpose without the need for the end-user to wade through a ton of commercialization and widely varying quality of information.

Wolfram|Alpha is a marriage of sorts between those two purposes with the added benefit of a highly refined parser and search algorithm that trends toward understanding your intent rather than defaulting to variable popularity and commercialized interests. Using it also requires unlearning a lot that we all have learned about using Google to its best advantage.

If you watch the demo video of Wolfram|Alpha, you get a good sampling of the kinds of things it is intended to do, none of which Google can even approach.

It's far more than a "geek tool" in that respect.

As a personal example, I tested it this past evening using some searches I did this past fall and winter using Google in which I was seeking demographic and statistical information relevant to some research I've been doing. I'm fairly good at using Google to mine for relevant information, and I had the advantage of having access to numerous electronic libraries with specific kinds of information, essays, books, raw data, statistical abstracts, etc. That is, I had tons of resources. Some of the information I had to find took weeks for individual elements. Some of the same searches in Wolfram|Alpha came up instantly just by using specific terms and without having to wade through a mess of "Find CHEAP hotels in ..." a town that hasn't even existed for 100 years.

Better than that, combining terms and adding some operators, the engine did some of the comparative analysis for me. I compared all that with the data I had compiled to check for accuracy, and it was very accurate.

I guess the point is that Google tries to be everything to all people and is rather good at that, but that goal creates inherent limitations in the utility of the information found. I've never been impressed by the "Showing 1-10 of ten billion" hits for a particular set of terms. That many hits is a bad thing for a lot of serious research. Efficient search engines reduce hits down to relevant possibilities. Google does that as well as its technology allows, but it's actually not very good at that at all, mostly due to flaws that are fundamentally intentional.

Anyways ... I was very impressed by it.

[Why Syzygy]

5. That's good to hear.

Thanks for posting that.
But in all fairness, what you describe as your research, the method and likely purpose, qualifies as "geek".
You used a geek tool to accomplish a geek assignment/task.
seeking demographic and statistical information relevant to some research
Right? :P

Google is so far ahead of any other 'search engine'. However, they recently announced a change in their algorithms to 'enhance' search results. After that I noticed a distinct decline in accurate returns for my purposes. All the geek forums I trust used to come up on the first page. Not so now. Sometimes innovations don't turn out the way we hoped. And that's okay because that's what innovations are for.

My experiment was just done quickly with the search term I had in Google at the time. I'll try it for other attempts to get a feel for it. I really am glad it's useful for you. (geek)

[charlie]

6. It's only a geek tool at the moment

What Wolfram's aiming for is something more ambitious than Google. It's not a search engine, it's a knowledge base with a "mind" behind it, one that will learn context and meaningful cross-correlation from user input and eventually evolve into something approaching a "natural language" tool. Google gives you links, WA returns (hopefully) useful information.

[RoyGBiv]

7. Yeah, well ...

I remember the day Google was launched. It was a "geek tool" also. People said some of the same things about it. Webcrawler was *far* more useful because it gave you *everything* you could possibly ever want in a million years and in infinite alternate universes.

My example was perhaps a poor one to convey what I was trying to get across, which charlie said more succinctly and which I noted up front before saying it was more than just a "geek tool in that respect."

The point of the thing is the way it processes search queries against vast storehouses of information and then presents results.

Google looks at the words.

Wolfram|Alpha seeks to look at the meaning and intent behind the search terms and phrases used. It seeks to interpret language rather than ASCII strings.

OnEdit: I apologize if it seems I am having a somewhat visceral reaction to the phrase "geek tool" because I am in fact having a visceral reaction to it, and it's not directed at you personally. In the present context, this comes across as dismissive, something that would only serve the needs of highly specialized inquiries. I see that kind of thing said about Linux, about how using a command like 'convert -size 1024x768 image.jpg image-resized.jpg' (or creating a script that will do entire directories of images takes 15 seconds to type and save and run, after which it never has to be created again) is so overbearingly "geek" and somehow a worse option than installing a multi-gigabyte software package that costs several hundred dollars just so you can scale down the photos you've imported from your digital camera.

I don't mean to pick. It's just that Google has lost its way. It was once the leader in innovation for search technology trying to help us sift through the unimaginable volumes of information on the Internet to find what we want. Now it is mostly concerned with creating web apps, competing with Microsoft, and tailoring its search technology so that it throws commercial results at end-users more frequently than genuinely helpful information.

At the very least, Wolfram|Alpha has brought us innovation again. Where it will go from here remains to be seen, of course.

[Why Syzygy]

8. Noted!

We're coming from two different pools then. The term "geek" to me is one of endearment. I find them some of the most fun and interesting co-workers and friends. No offense at all. But I'll note your visceral and watch my mouth.

Now that you mention it, I think I was using Webcrawler pre Google. I was thinking the same about them having lost their way. I'm very dependent on them in any case.

The larger context shows me that language is becoming more meaningful in computing processes.

[RoyGBiv]

9. Usually is to me too ...

But in the technology sphere, it's used in popular expressions as a term of dismissal, something the average person could never understand and never use nor ever want to use.

That use has really started to annoy me more lately than ever for some reason, in part because it is so demeaning, not to geeks, but to everyone who doesn't consider themselves a geek. My mother thought she could never use Linux because it was just a geek thing ... until I installed it on her machine, and she found she'd been using it for weeks before rebooting her machine after a round of thunderstorms and realizing that was not the Windows logo at startup.

A lot of people stay away from "geek tools" simply because they think it is so far above them that they couldn't possible find it useful, or that it's too hard. They've been led to believe that. People shy away from the command line because it's too hard, but those same people, given a weekend and enough boredom, will figure out how to make their MySpace pages look like Times Square on acid.

Companies make billions of dollars off this attitude, which they have invested millions to instill. Microsoft, a company built by a geek, depends on end-users not being able to understand that some of those things they spend millions per year to get MS to do for them could be done quite easily and with little to no expense on their own, just in a different way. The bulk of anti-malware industry (both creating it and defending against it) is based on the same expectation of ignorance.

I'm going a bit far afield here I realize, but I think this is the natural extension of looking at technological innovation as existing solely in the realm of the already-initiated. Hell, I know only slightly more than a damn thing about how W|A works under the hood, and I have a long way to go to be able to use it to maximum advantage. But I recognize innovation when I see it. For the first time in a long time I see a group doing innovation in search technology.

As an aside, a lot of people think search technology in and of itself is relatively simple, that it's static and can't really be improved much. I find this funny in a sad sort of way. One of the first projects given in the one and only programming class I started to take (and then dropped because I was so damn bored I couldn't stay awake at 8am), was to write a search function and parser. The result turned out by most of us was abysmal, with the process for a search on a single word out of a few thousand words taking half an hour to complete. Granted this was when the typical processor speed was ~2Ghz, and the only place you found more than 16K of RAM was in the mainframe at school, but still. It's just not as easy as it seems, and I have a lot of respect for people who can make it work better, particularly in the presentation of data.

[charlie]

10. The first lulz...

See the synonym network at the bottom:

http://www90.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=kittens

[paparush]

11. Wolfram is NOT a search engine. Its a computational engine.

Big difference.