The Veil Is Lifted From Wolfram Alpha

[anon]

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine.

In a talk at Harvard Law School, Stephen Wolfram, a well-known mathematician, scientist and entrepreneur, gave a demonstration of his soon-to-be released Web service which promises to answer all sorts of questions. The service, called Wolfram Alpha, had technology bloggers abuzz that a rival to Google was about to hit the Web.

While search engines like Google, by and large, find things that already exist on the Internet - Web sites, photos, videos, blogs - Wolfram Alpha answers questions, often by doing complex, and new computations.

It's hard to judge a product from a demo, but by the looks of it, Wolfram Alpha is impressive.

The Veil Is Lifted From Wolfram Alpha - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/wolfram-alpha-veil-lifted/)

[slikrapid]

one might say its about time to release some new technology that would be effective in searching and give us the results we really want

nowadays Google is giving tons of results based on complex algorithms, usually mixing a lot of information the user doesn't want and if sites aren't enough SEO optimized you probably won't find them at all

nevertheless he who controls search engines controls information that comes out, so it will be interesting to see if the results will contain official information as well as opposing information so that the user can make his opinion more or less unbiased

[anon]

nowadays Google is giving tons of results based on complex algorithms, usually mixing a lot of information the user doesn't want and if sites aren't enough SEO optimized you probably won't find them at all

Plus many well-known Web sites use "dirty" tactics to further increase the visibility - the online version of the New York Times journal cloaks itself, allowing search engines to read its articles, but making real people have to register first. You can easily realize this by disabling cookies or changing your User-Agent to Googlebot/1.0. :eek13:

[slikrapid]

New York Times journal cloaks itself, allowing search engines to read its articles, but making real people have to register first

sometimes Google Cache can help with that, but if you want to read more articles from a site with such cloaking its difficult to repeat the process over and over again