Wolfram Alpha: An invention that could change the Internet forever | Hacker News Reader

Wolfram Alpha: An invention that could change the Internet forever

independent.co.uk

24 pointszeantsoi19 comments

>"Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information."

I'm sure Wolfram could partner with Amazon to crowdsource some of this data gathering through Mechanical Turk. For example, collecting data on celebrities (e.g. height, birth date, family relations). Turk users would fill out forms and cite where they got the data from.

This is actually a really good idea and I wonder if Wolfram and Co. have considered this.

Additional note: I get super pumped when I read something on HN and I think to myself "Damn! That is a fine idea." It always makes me grin.

In the Q&A after his Harvard presentation last month Stephen said he would not crowdsource Wolfram Alpha. In short the reason he gave is that crowdsourcing is unreliable. Stephen used as an example the problems of Wikipedia where rogue interests and non-experts manipulate results. He only wants great curators of knowledge to sign off on the inputs. That way when you search for something on Wolfram Alpha you can expect near certainty in the results.

The ontology of Wolfram Alpha is involved. Those professional researchers in Champaign who understand how to talk to Wolfram Alpha are not getting their data from simple Google searches and then citing their sources. This is a complex process even for simple data points. If Wolfram Alpha has a need for Mechanical Turk it would be to catch mistakes or maybe do information triage - but Stephen made clear he doesn't want quasi experts going anywhere near the research department.

A disturbingly tabloid headline. The article's premise is that it could change certain aspects of search, though I'm sceptical - others have tried human-curated 'knowledge databases' and we all still use Google and Wikipedia.

Plus, I think today's searchers - for the most part - speak search engine lingo, and have certain expectations. I don't want my search results to play D# major if that's what I'm searching for, I probably want to see the notes. I won't type in "10 flips for four heads", I'll type in "coin tossing probability".

I can see kids doing homework projects having fun with this, but beyond? Dunno. I'm quite happy for it to be a wild success and prove me wrong, I'm just very sceptical this will happen.

If Alpha lives up to its hype, I think we'll find incredibly useful (yet non-obvious at the moment) applications for it, and one day we'll wonder how we ever lived without such a service.

Agree 100%. It's not the "search engine" that matters; it's what will (assuming WA delivers) be built on top of it. Google Maps is pretty good on its own, but to fully appreciate its usefulness you have to look at all the stuff built using its API. Ideally, WA will be as useful and powerful a platform, but without a limited domain like maps.

If Alpha lives up to its hype

That is the tough issue here. The hype has been immense.

Agreed - it's been immense, and (unfortunately) I think I can predict what will happen upon launch - someone will find a witty "search" or question that WA should have no problem with (or they think it should have no problem with), and WA will spit out some nonsensical answer, and it will get posted to every site under the headline "Wolfram Alpha can't even answer this simple question, how is it going to take on Google?". It will become a joke, and only those who understand it will continue to use it, while the rest will dismiss it because they likely won't understand it. I'm hopeful, but not too hopeful.

I don't think WA is going to get Cuiled.

Cuil results really were nonsense, and still are today. It wasn't some over-hyped bad publicity that was Cuil's downfall -it was their crappy software.

If WA is good, people will use it, and the talking heads won't have any say in the matter.

You are kind of comparing apples and oranges here. I don't think Alpha would be really hurt if the majority of people found it useless.

All Wolfram has to do is to allow developers access to the API. I'm just not totally sure how he will allow access to the program right now.

Google's search engine isn't incredibly useful to the person who doesn't like using it. But Alpha has the possibility possibility of being useful to people who wouldn't even visit the site.

At the very minimum, it has a lot of potential for search aggregation. Let's say that someone wanted to create a site that aggregated travel information. It sounds like a developer could basically create mini-travel guides on demand for specific regions or towns. So you would quickly get info on crime, cost, food, weather, and tourist attractions. Or you could actually just rank travel places based on certain criteria. So if I wanted to find a cheap place that currently had warm weather, beaches, and low crime, I might be able to get a lot of useful information. I wouldn't need to use Alpha myself, somebody would have just had to develop a site to aggregate the results.

I have no idea what it's killer use will be, but this has the potential to be very useful to developers. So once developers start taking advantage of it, I believe it would be successful.

I agree - it's for sure an apples to oranges comparison, but unfortunately I have a feeling that most users (and main stream media outlets) will gloss that over and pronounce it the "non" Google killer. I also agree with you that the potential lies in something we may not be able to envision at this point, but if developers get turned on to the platform it might be really successful.

The thing that made it click for me while watching Wolfram's presentation was emphasis on computable knowledge. Google excels at finding anything that someone, somewhere, has explicity written out. With a few narrow exceptions, it does nothing to help you synthesize information. Alpha is likely to be a poor source of finding most kinds of information but an excellent source for synthesizing what information it has.

In other words: Google can help you find things like a phone book can help you find things, Alpha can help you find things like a calculator can help you find things.

The articles I've been reading about it give horrible examples. Like how typing in "how high is Mount Everest?" into WA will get you the exact answer. Only problem is, if you type that in google, the first hit is the exact answer.

Sounds like that bad joke... the punch line being "and so modest, too!"

Stephen Wolfram's not just modest - he's A New Kind of Modest.

Seriously, though - I can't help but think that no matter how brilliant Wolfram Alpha might be, it will never end up being as good as he thinks it is. I hope I'm proved wrong, but that unpleasant feeling has definitely coloured my opinion thus far.

We keep hearing about, when is it going to be available (so we can see if all this hype is true or not)?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/ still says "Launching May 2009" and it's now May 3rd.

Perhaps your first query to Alpha should be "how many days in May"?

I'd also be curious about "how many days left in May"?

This was the front page of the print version of The Independent today (Sunday 3rd May) !

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