Reviews and a New Search Engine
May 8th, 2009
Good morning, readers! Today we’ll start with the weekly posts.
Here are two links to philosophical reviews to amuse you this week:
- The April 2009 reviews from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
- A link to Philosopher’s Digest, a site that provides “Timely Reviews of Current Philosophy Articles”
I recently learned about a new search engine, Wolfram|Alpha, which is set to launch this month. What exactly is Wolfram|Alpha? According to a post on the WolframAlpha Blog,
So what is Wolfram|Alpha? To begin, we’ve named it a computational knowledge engine.
The heart of Wolfram|Alpha is a computational engine able to draw on terabytes of curated data and synthesize it into entirely new combinations and presentations. The stock of systematic, structured data in the world is vast, but finite, and the efficient processes developed for Wolfram|Alpha have allowed us to make real progress towards the goal of incorporating all of it.
Our overarching goal, the “higher purpose” of this project, is to make all computable, factual knowledge available to everyone. What Wolfram|Alpha does is compute on top of those facts—answering questions, solving equations, providing insights, projecting future behaviors, and more.
We believe the result is an extremely powerful way of harnessing the world’s knowledge and making it possible for anyone to benefit from that power.
My interest is certainly piqued, and I will be curious to use this new search engine when it is launched.
May 12th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
I’m pretty excited at the new search engine news ’cause I think the effect that WolframAlpha will have regarding online research and data parsing could be quite significant. However there’s also been much talk about this being a Google killer and was wondering what your thoughts on that are?
http://www.sagerock.com/blog/wolframalpha-not-google-killer/
May 12th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Hi Greg,
From what I’ve been seeing so far, I’m not seeing Wolfram|Alpha as being a Google killer. For certain kinds of searches, it will be very important, as you note. But overall? I don’t think so.
There’s something on CNN.com notes that Wolfram|Alpha “is more of an enormous calculator than a search: It crunches data to come up with query answers that may not exist online until you search for them.”* So, it’s not exactly doing the same thing as Google — thus, to suggest that it’s a Google killer is to compare the proverbial apple with an orange.
If Wolfram|Alpha does take off, I suspect it will be much as the CNN.com article suggests: it will supplement Google, but not kill it. It’s doing something very different from what Google does, and will likely be a useful niche search engine.
As the CNN.com article notes, Cuil tried to topple Google last year, but went nowhere. My thought is that a number of niche search engines like Wolfram|Alpha will continued to be developed, but, unless someone comes up with something revolutionary, or the company itself goes under, Google will continue to be the top dawg of the search engine pack.
That’s my take on it. That, and $2, gets you a medium coffee at the local coffee shop.
Thanks for commenting!
*(The full link is here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/05/12/future.search.engine/index.html?iref=t2test_techtues&eref=rss_topstories — I’ll post this link again on Friday.)