Stephen X: A New Kind of Science » Wolfram

Bing, Google and Wolfram Alpha on the Future of Search

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:15:44 +0000

Drawing from location awareness and voice recognition technologies, representatives from Bing, Google and Wolfram Alpha weigh in on the future of Internet search. Bing’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas promises a revised form of search that offers time and location specific results custom-tailored to the user.

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DLD is an inspiring community for the 21st century which features digital innovation, science and culture and brings together thought leaders, creators, entrepreneurs and investors from Europe, the Middle-East, the Americas and Asia.

This session on Web search features Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Bing), Ben Gomes (Google), Ilya Segalovich (Yandex) and Conrad Wolfram (Wolfram Alpha). Jochen Wegner (Focus Online) moderates.

In 2004 Blaise Aguera y Arcas founded Seadragon, Inc., to develop ideas in scalable architectures and user interfaces for interacting with large volumes of visual information, potentially over a narrow-bandwidth connection. Microsoft bought Seadragon at the beginning of 2006. The Seadragon team’s most visible project to date is Photosynth (labs.live.com/photosynth), a collaboration with researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington.

Ben Gomes is a Distinguished Engineer at Google where he is a lead for the company’s engineering efforts on search features. Gomes has been with Google for more than ten years and has worked in the development of nearly all aspects of the Google search service ranging from crawling and indexing to ranking and new feature design.

Conrad Wolfram founded Wolfram Research Europe Ltd. in 1991 and in 1997 also became Strategic Director at Wolfram Research, Inc., founded by brother Stephen. In 2009, the Wolfram |Alpha knowledge engine spin-off was launched to dramatic interest – both because of its new approach and the unique combination of Wolfram Technologies which made it possible.

Earthquake Activity in Chile

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:12:17 +0000

Saturday’s massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile has captured the attention and concern of the world community. The area continues to be plagued by dozens of smaller quakes including at least nine of magnitude 6.0 or higher.

Below is a timeline of earthquake activity in Chile over the last 72 hours. Wolfram|Alpha’s earthquake data is updated every six minutes with information reported by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS reports activity within 30 minutes of most seismic events worldwide.

In addition to the map and timeline, the output shows the top three earthquakes (ranked in decreasing order of magnitude) within the past 72 hours, and clicking the “More” button will pull up information on the lower-magnitude shocks. Furthermore, you can see exact coordinates by clicking the “Show coordinates” button.

If you’re monitoring quake activity in Chile or other parts of the world, you will find Wolfram|Alpha useful for exploring a single event or series of events by time, location, and magnitude.

(The image below reflects activity within the 72 hours before this post was written; click the image for current information and further exploration.)

h4>Incoming search terms for the article:

seismic activities before a massive earthquake

Wolfram Alpha Open Data To Others with API

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:09:27 +0000

This may be a step toward monetization and/or an admission that as a “search destination” it’s foundering.

Wolfram today has a defined range of data (see the Wikipedia list), making it unpredictable for those not familiar with its capabilities and limitations

Not long ago “computational engine” Wolfram Alpha struck a deal with Microsoft to license some of its data to Bing. Now, according to the Guardian UK, Wolfram is going wide with that strategy and will soon enable an API that third parties can use to create mashups or enhance their sites.

By juxtaposing itself with Google or positioning itself as superior to Google in a number of ways, Wolfram created some confusion (and disappointment) in the market. People showed up and didn’t know how to use it, incorrectly assuming it was a search engine.

The Un-Google Wolfram Alpha review

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:07:10 +0000

I’ve been playing around with Wolfram Alpha for a couple of days. In all, I agree with Danny’s “impressive” verdict. And it functions in a way that’s very different than any other search engine I’ve ever used. Even beyond impressive, the words that best describe the experience of using Wolfram Alpha are “fun” and “enchanting.”

Wolfram Alpha’s interface allows you to enter queries in natural language. It then tries to disambiguate your query and present relevant facts, charts, illustrations and other supporting “tools.” If it can’t understand your query, you’ll see a “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” message, Sometimes it doesn’t have enough information to work with; in these cases you see a “development of this topic is under investigation…” message.

The system also does intelligent things with non-query related information. For example, in calculating distance or physical space, it infers your location (presumably by reading your computer’s IP address) and adjusts numeric or chart/graph data accordingly.

When you’re first starting out using Wolfram Alpha, I’d recommend checking out the hundreds of pre-populated “examples” to see how certain types of queries are best structured. Many of these examples feature structured input fields (for example, weights, measures, dates, and so on) so you can express your question more specifically than with natural language.

Here are some examples showing what Wolfram Alpha can do that would be difficult to impossible to do in Google—or any other search engine, for that matter. You’ll be able to replicate these once Wolfram Alpha is available to everyone; I’m showing screen shots (rather than including links) because I’m working with preproduction test servers rather than the final system set to be launched later today.

I’m also focusing on categories that aren’t traditionally regarded as computationally intensive. Wolfram|Alpha excels at any type of numeric calculation, but it’s also surprisingly good at “computing” information with non-numeric data.

The Un-Google

h4>Incoming search terms for the article:

ipodvideoconverters net

Whese is The Name of Wolfram Alpha From?

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:04:42 +0000

“Whether this ends up being Wolfram Alpha or overtaking our Wolfram.com site, that’s a subject of great internal debate at our company. We were keen to make sure this product is associated with our brand. Worst case, if we never figure out a business model at all, it’s great example of what the technology we have built can do. Our corporate name is as good a nonsense word as any Web 2.0 word,” he said.

I’ve seen a fair amount of criticism that “Wolfram Alpha” doesn’t come along as a catchy name that will resonate with general searchers. Certainly, I find it a bit clunky. Is that really going to be the final name?

Commenting further, he added about the “Alpha” part:

“There’s a bit of this being the first of something and a bit of humility that’s just the beginning of what I expect will be a very long term project. This is basically my third large project in life.”

Wolfram is Aiming For Profits

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:02:09 +0000

Wolfram Alpha hopes to pay for itself in two ways When it goes live, Some deals for these are already in place for when the site goes live, though Wolfram didn’t reveal which companies will show there.

Certainly no self-serve AdWords-like system appears in the works. Unlike traditional search ads, these don’t appear to be cost-per-click driven, The right-side of pages — the “right-rail” in search engine vernacular — will carry sponsorships

Will this all make the service eventually profitable?

“I hope it will be. I’ve invested quite a lot of money in it, as you can guess. I certainly hope to make that money back, otherwise it is a very grand piece of philanthropy on my part,” Wolfram said, with a chuckle.

There will also be a corporate version eventually, which will allow users to do queries that involve heavy amounts of computation, to upload their own data in bulk or download data sets. The company also envisions licensing out private versions of the service and is still planning other offerings.

As for the business issues still to be determined?

“I’m one of those people who doesn’t go for, ‘Let’s make an absolutely precise business plan’,” Wolfram said.

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. No searching is involved here

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:59:15 +0000

Complimentary To Google, Not Competitive

While I think technically that Wolfram Alpha will be pretty amazing — and indeed a huge new significant tool that people should consider — It remains a specialized search tool, and general searchers — which are among those Wolfram Alpha is targeting — typically do not go directly to such tools.it will still face a hefty awareness challenge.

Sound amazing? As I’ve said before, I’m pretty jaded about search. Any number of would-be Google-killers have come and gone without gaining traction.

Wolfram’s specific that the service isn’t aiming to be a Google-killer or even considers it a traditional search engine that competes.

“We are not a search engine. No searching is involved here,” he said. “The types of things that people are currently searching for have some overlap [with Google], but it isn’t huge. What’s exciting is that we have a whole new class of things that people can put into a input field and have it tell them what it knows.”

Wolfram Alpha Disambiguating Queries

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:57:11 +0000

From last post Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” is Amazing Stats, At Your Fingertips

Any search engines faces the “disambiguation” challenge, figuring out what someone is after when a word can have multiple meanings. Did “apple” mean the fruit or the computer company, for example.

Search engines traditionally use related search options to assist users. In addition, they rely on the fact that by presenting up to 10 different listings per page, they have multiple chances of guessing at the query intent correctly.

Wolfram Alpha, by having a single answer page, doesn’t get such chances. So to help, it makes its best guess at what particular meaning it thinks a word has and presents options to get other answers, based on other definitions. For example with “apple,” it defaults to the “financial entity” term but suggests there’s also:

a species specification
a spacecraft
a general material
a food

It then allows the user to change their answer based on those:

Wolfram says a huge amount of work has gone into having human editors develop the classification schemes. These are used for more than helping searches select the right definitions for their searches. They also allow the service to know how to automatically blend answers from different data sources into a single page.

For instance, Wolfram Alpha has lots of information from different sources about foods. It has lots of information from different sources about financial data. When a search is done for Apple, and it knows someone means Apple the computer company, it uses this tagging or classification to pull relevant data only out of financial databases, to create an Apple page on the fly. Food information is not used — otherwise, you’d have an odd page where along with a financial chart for the company, you might also get nutrition information for the fruit.

The service also makes use of IP data to help disambiguate. If by using your IP address, it knows you’re near a particular city, then it will use that along with other factors to decide which “city” data to show you in the case of multiple cities with the same name. A “city fame index” is also used.

Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” is Amazing Stats, At Your Fingertips

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:55:48 +0000

Last post we talked about Fact Engine of Wolfram Alpha

Do a search on Wolfram Alpha, and if it has matching data, it presents a ton of information on a single page, from figures to charts. For example, a search for “newport beach” not only shows the current temperature and forecast but also provides easy access to historical temperatures, which also get charted:

Looking for the gross domestic product of a country, say France? Wolfram Alpha’s got that:

Housing starts in the United States? Got that:

Want to know how popular the name Daniel is in the United States over time and how many people are currently estimated to be alive with that name, plus their ages? Wolfram Alpha can do that, too — though I wasn’t quick enough to screenshot that example during the demo. We moved fast! But over at Read Write Web, See Wolfram Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots has more examples you can view.

Wolfram Alpha also made a public demo debut this week at Harvard, which you can watch here:

Here’s a shorter version that shows actual screenshots of the service.

David Weinberger also has an excellent summary of the public demo.

The Impressive Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:53:05 +0000

Much attention has been focused on the forthcoming Wolfram Alpha search service. Will it be as important as Google has become? Perhaps! A new search paradigm? Yes! Or at least a new way of gathering information. A Google-killer? Nope! But when the service launches, it should become an essential in anyone’s search tool kit.

Wolfram Alpha is backed by Stephen X, the noted scientist and author behind the Mathematica computational software and the book, A New Kind Of Science. The service bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” which is a mouthful. I’d call it a “fact search engine” or perhaps an “answer search engine,” a term that’s been used in the past for services designed to provide you with direct answers, rather than point you at pages that in turn may hold those answers.

Earlier this week, I talked with Stephen to understand how the service works.next is , my look.