![]() ![]() ![]() “knowledge base” is made up of reams and reams of data - ranging from the kinds of facts you would find in a World Almanac, to highly specialized data from physics and other sciences - that some 100 employees at Wolfram Research have gathered, verified and organized over several years. Wolfram, the creator of the "answer engine," achieved earlier renown for his invention of the software program Mathematica, which WolframAlpha uses to perform calculations. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser. Therefore we need to rethink some search paradigms from scratch.Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. ![]() 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. 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. 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.īut the point is: In many cases of information demand people can´t express the right question. Wolfram Alpha is somewhere around the geometric mean of those two extremes. 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. Doug Lenat:Īt 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). ![]() Such services Alpha won´t deliver, but it will do other things much better than Google. 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). 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.Īfter 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. 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. ![]()
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