If Nova Spivack and Doug Lenat are positive with what they have seen from Wolfram Alpha, I am also close of being convinced that the internet community won´t be dissapointed by Alpha´s first release. Just remember, which hype was caused by Cuil´s PR-strategy of spreading news about their first release throughout the blogosphere, and scarcely anybody would talk about this engine anymore.
After all what I have read about Wolfram Alpha, one thing obviously can be stated: Wolfram Alpha will be a perfect addition to traditional search engines like Google, but will never replace it. For example: In the first paragraph of this blog I have used Google Services like “Google Blog Search” or “Google Trends” to prove some of my statements (in a broader sense: to give answers to those, who want to know, why this is my opinion). Such services Alpha won´t deliver, but it will do other things much better than Google. Doug Lenat:
At one extreme is, say, Google, which responds to almost anything like a faithful puppy bringing in the morning newspaper without understanding much of anything it’s fetching (recognizing words in what it returns, often leading to amusing or hair-raising inappropriate “ads” being displayed, and leading to tons of false positives and false negatives). At the other extreme is, say, Cyc, which only can answer a small fraction of user queries, but can answer ones that require common sense (not just common sense queries like “Do surgeons often operate on themselves?”, but ones where the logical application of such knowledge is required to correctly disambiguate and parse the user’s query containing pronouns, elisions, ambiguous words, ellipsis, and so on) and where every piece of the query and every piece of the answer is as deeply understood as, say, arithmetic. Wolfram Alpha is somewhere around the geometric mean of those two extremes.
Search engines or question answering machines (QA) which understand the meaning of the query and/or of the result are not completely new and some of them are really useful like good old START.
But the point is: In many cases of information demand people can´t express the right question.
Why didn´t START become the default browser if it can even answer questions? I think the USP of Alpha will be, that it can give the right answer to more questions than any other QA machine before. But still, the real “search engine revolution” won´t happen, until engines will be able to help users to formulate the proper questions and will help to interprate the right results. Therefore we need to rethink some search paradigms from scratch.
Hi,
very good insight
. I agree with analysis.
The big question is what can be done about the “query by association” and descriptive queries.
I am not seeing any advances regarding this.
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
Thanks Andraz, we will see, if I am right with my guess.
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Doesn’t it look like a step back? Whole that thing about indexing databases from different science fields, created especially for this project. I wonder if people would like to use something what looks like digital Encyclopedia (but in 100% credible on contrary to Wikipedia). I think they will find constant group of users but if it is all what is going to be indexed they are definitely not going to become loved by masses, that are used to get democratized knowledge they can contribute to.
If Wolfram Alpha will have a “Google suggest”-like option when someone typing in the question then it may revolutionize search as we know it. I do agree with the above comment that in most cases people simply don’t know how to phrase the question properly. The key to receiving the right answers is how you form the question. Sometimes people go through life and only ask themselves questions later in life that if asked earlier may have turned their life path different direction…
My 2.9 cents
We often think of math something we have invented to explain the universe based on emperical evidence but in fact if you drop enough matches on a table you will find the number Pi which leads to the calculated answer of a circle. This intersection between math and cellular automata in this way leads to an answer to the circumference of the earth. So by putting a natural language processor on top and grabbing the implied context(s) and deviations you could skip the math part and vary the bottom layer algorithms of the physical universe to calculate the answer. In other words somebody asks for the distance of flight from Madrid to Sydney and instead of calculating the arc via mathemtical formula you start dropping sticks or some reduced mini celluar automata.
Lets say you want to know how strong the TV signal is in a valley. First you figure out the domain which in this case is radio waves and transmission. Youget the relevant input like radio tower locations and terrain but then you dont use Maxwells Equations you use the fact that space is 3 dimensional and that something must spread from here to there. You include the terrain in the model and calculate and calculate and drop lower order terms.
So we can think of the stack the normal way we deal with stuff as:
1) Ideas
2) Language
3) Physics and Empirically Observed Results (Theory)
4) Math
5) Cellular Automata of the Universe
Wolfram Alfa seems to cutout the middle and deal with it this way:
1) Ideas
2) Language
3) Cellular Automata of the Universe
Update 3: OK just ran into a job add which says that Wolfram is adding 75 positions from various diciplines. While this add does not the actual product it seems like Wolfram Alfa to me. They use the terminaology “data packlets”. The articles talk about hiring researchers for data mining and curating.
I don’t get why everyone writes and article about this and makes a big deal of the caveat: “THIS WON’T REPLACE GOOGLE” as if it were falling short in that regard.
It isn’t even intended to replace Google in any way because it is a completely different service. Just because it happens to be a search engine doesn’t mean much. Any search engine competes with Google in the broad sense of finding information, but Google is focused on web pages, like PizzaTorrent is focused on torrents, and Wolfram is focused on correlating data available on the web. Different tools using similar technology.