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I am puzzled that people think this is a Wikipedia or Google killer. I think it is much more disruptive to general websites. This project makes many websites ob

by lena 17y ago

I am puzzled that people think this is a Wikipedia or Google killer. I think it is much more disruptive to general websites. This project makes many websites obsolete for many purposes. If people now want to know how many calories are in a product, they go to a website that specializes in that (directly or they find it through Google), but why do that if Wolfram Alpha gives you that information quickly, and presented in a more interesting way? The same goes for many of the topics he presented. Baby names are also popular website topics, but none of the specialist babyname websites are as comprehensive as a Wolfram Alpha search on different names.

thorax 17y ago
I predict it doesn't obsolete anything except for power searchers and data researchers. People are still going to type "how many calories in a big mac" into Google and get specialized sites that answer those questions fine. I don't think they'll go to WA when they have a habit and good success rate with getting those casual answers on Google. I think professionals and power users may use WA in cases they know it will give them great responses, but I don't see it changing many casual user habits. What would be interesting is if WA actually caches search results and makes them indexable by other search engines like we do with bug.gd (which is similar in the sense that bug.gd is a specialized search service). This proves to create a tremendous amount of traffic and could make the provided/refined content much more likely to obsolete those niche sites.
- ericb 17y ago
  I don't know about that. I think users will catch on. Think about Weight Watchers, for example. I can get a whole nutrition label for the lunch I just ate in one place at Wolfram alpha. With google, I have to add it up...
  - lena 17y ago
    I also think users will catch on. Maybe not immediately, but google and wikipedia were also just for power users at first. The benefit is so great, and it is so easy to use, that people will talk about it on forums and explain how it works. They may not at first use it as their general knowledge tool, but they will use it for the information they want most.
10ren 17y ago
if Wolfram Alpha gives you that information quickly Scaling will be a problem. It's doing more work than google, but without their datacentres, parallelization techniques or incremental experience. Being fast was at least half of google's success. (I agree it's not competing with google; it's just an example of scaling well.) But, on Google, did you know they acquired http://www.gapminder.com http://www.gapminder.com ? And, if they get mobilized, why couldn't they follow where Wolfram has led - but with faster results?

by lena 17y ago

thorax 17y ago

I predict it doesn't obsolete anything except for power searchers and data researchers. People are still going to type "how many calories in a big mac" into Google and get specialized sites that answer those questions fine. I don't think they'll go to WA when they have a habit and good success rate with getting those casual answers on Google. I think professionals and power users may use WA in cases they know it will give them great responses, but I don't see it changing many casual user habits. What would be interesting is if WA actually caches search results and makes them indexable by other search engines like we do with bug.gd (which is similar in the sense that bug.gd is a specialized search service). This proves to create a tremendous amount of traffic and could make the provided/refined content much more likely to obsolete those niche sites.

ericb 17y ago
I don't know about that. I think users will catch on. Think about Weight Watchers, for example. I can get a whole nutrition label for the lunch I just ate in one place at Wolfram alpha. With google, I have to add it up...
- lena 17y ago
  I also think users will catch on. Maybe not immediately, but google and wikipedia were also just for power users at first. The benefit is so great, and it is so easy to use, that people will talk about it on forums and explain how it works. They may not at first use it as their general knowledge tool, but they will use it for the information they want most.

10ren 17y ago

if Wolfram Alpha gives you that information quickly Scaling will be a problem. It's doing more work than google, but without their datacentres, parallelization techniques or incremental experience. Being fast was at least half of google's success. (I agree it's not competing with google; it's just an example of scaling well.) But, on Google, did you know they acquired http://www.gapminder.com http://www.gapminder.com ? And, if they get mobilized, why couldn't they follow where Wolfram has led - but with faster results?