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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

And of course, you've come to this opinion after extensive use of Wolfram Alpha over a good period of time. No? Just empty prejudices based on second-hand impressions?

Honestly, what's with the battle lines being drawn? The product hasn't come out yet, and basically no one has used it. It seems like it will be an excellent compliment to existing search engines and data sources, but you have to wait and see.

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In addition to second-hand impressions, there's a long history of failed products/approaches similar to this one.

Google has found a sweet spot. And it won't change anytime soon.

which are the the similar failed stories?

Natural language interfaces have failed repeatedly. And so have attempts at the semantic web.

What does work and scales is more free form as is the case with the Web today.

And Google makes "free form" work.

there are people out there that cant write in C. Does that mean good programs wouldnt have been written in it?

Remember Cuil? Fostering press that you're an X killer is a good sign of future failure.

you havent even tried it yet. How is it possible το compare two different products? You can put two different people implement the same concepts in algorithms and you will get two different results and you compare a whole product because others failed?

I can appreciate Empiricism as much as the next guy, but Google Search, Cuil, and Alpha seem comparable.

edit: the dreaded homonym! I mean they can be meaningfully compared to each other, not that they are the equivalent.

Read the thread again, I was simply giving an example of a similar failed story. Wolfram may or may not fail at this, I simply believe hype of a Google killer before launch is a bad sign.

Your criticisms apply just as easily to the carefully built, optimistic buzz Wolfram is attempting to create...the same thing he tried with "A New Kind of Science".

the same thing he tried with "A New Kind of Science".

Which is, it turns out, the single most important book about science in the history of the printed word. In fact, it might be more important than the printed word itself. It's a new kind of printed word.

I hope that was sarcasm

So, what tipped you off?

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