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My worry is that this stuff was cherry-picked. Also, like Google (at least at first), this is going to be most useful to the people who think like the creators
by randallsquared 18y ago
My worry is that this stuff was cherry-picked. Also, like Google (at least at first), this is going to be most useful to the people who think like the creators. I remember when Google appeared, some people (me, f'r instance) were able to get great results nearly every time, and other people seemed not to get the results they were looking for even after repeated attempts to refine the search. This effect lessened after a while, but Wolfram Alpha appears to have it in spades. I mean, "What is the GDP of France / Italy" clearly means to display a comparison of the GDPs of France and Italy, not to do some division producing a result that doesn't seem to have any relevance to anything... :)
- stcredzero 18y agoThey should be able to leverage this to make a fortune just off of day-traders.
- randallsquared 18y agoActually, the finance category seemed like less of an advance than much of the other stuff. Google and Yahoo produce charts and comparisons like this already, as far as I can see.
- stcredzero 18y agoYes, but I always wanted to be able to do correlations with more kinds of data. Non-financial data.
- Timothee 18y agoI agree. I don't see how it could work so nicely for everything. Though it seems that he picked a specific category (Mathematica) which helps quite a lot on what to do with the query. Take the example with the first names: "Andrew", then "Andrew John" (or whatever it was) which compares the two names over the years. What happens if I type "Elton John" now? The screencast was impressive but I'd like to try it by myself (which should be soon apparently) to realize how powerful it can be.
- misuba 18y agoThat everpresent "Mathematica" blurb on the screens doesn't represent any kind of site category, I don't think; the whole site is driven by Mathematica behind the scenes. The Mathematica link often visible looks like it goes to some sort of representation of that behind-the-scenes stuff, but that's just a guess.
- Timothee 18y agoOh ok, thanks for the info. Since I saw a big list of categories at the end of the screencast and remembered that "Mathematica" was there all along, I figured there was something to it. I just have a hard time believing that that kind of results can be achieved without more information than the keywords.
- rjurney 18y agoIf it does the computations demonstrated for even the limited range of data indicated in the UI, it represents an overwhelming advance in search. Even if they have to slowly, manually add new data as they go along. Think of it as a Wikipedia you can compute on. It will grow nicely. Compare this to the pile of information in Freebase. Pretty nice they've already linked relevant data for you, and can compute on relations.