Not a Search Engine An Answer Engine

"The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before."

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

can you give an example as to how it would be different the google.

Like if i were to google coal boiler prices how would it be different on this search engine compared to google

"In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a "computational knowledge engine" for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.

It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn't simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example."

http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/ ... -as-google

That sounds good, i like the idea. I checked the site and it says launching in may. I see its may now so when can we expect to try this out?

Like Ask.com? (That let's you ask for info in the form of a full question too)

Jeddbird wrote:Like Ask.com? (That let's you ask for info in the form of a full question too)

i think ask.com is a lot worse then google. so i hope this new wolframalpha web site is a lot better then both google and ask.

According to the article no it's not like ask.com . Search engines like ask.com and Google return results based on what they think the value of a page is based on a variety of things like the page title, what other pages link to it, the contents of the page, the link text of what links to it and many, many other things. In a perfect world Search Engines would return some very good results but since how these page values are calculated is known to some degree people (like myself ) try to attain better rankings. This can corrupt the results, many pages on the internet that are some of the best material available are buried because the author can care less...

This project if I'm reading it correctly is basically AI, you ask it a question and it returns an answer based on what it already knows. You may for example be familiar with A.L.I.C.E., this is a AI engine to some degree because it can carry a conversation but it's not really AI as it's knowledge is only based on what is stored in the database. It can't "think" but instead returns a predetermined answer. What differs about this project is that it can calculate answers or think based on already known knowledge.

Wolframalpha = major fail.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/dziuba_wolfram/

I was playing with it today. It could not come up with a single thing relative to my searches. In it's defense, it will take time for it to grow and develop into what it is supposed to be.

av8r wrote:Wolframalpha = major fail.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/dziuba_wolfram/

LOL got a good chuckle out of this:

and the information I need is about .......and why some *censored* snippet of CSS won't *censored* render in *censored* Internet Explorer *censored* 6.

Been there, done that.