... the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The "reports" that Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats...... Wolfram Alpha presents a different way of interacting with knowledge and data than anything else out there on the web ..... Wolfram Alpha is excellent at returning answers to mathematical queries and scientific queries, but it also can provide results based on its structured data. Most people know it now as one of the sources for Apple's Siri feature on the iPhone 4S. ..... in many cases the service can provide better results from Siri than from text queries because there is "more structure to what they're saying" than what most people have trained themselves to type into search fields. ..... provide "reports" instead of just "answers." ..... The first and most obvious feature is that users will get an account at Wolfram Alpha with a complete history of their queries, uploads, and downloads. ...... any number of export options — including a basic Excel spreadsheet, vector graphics, and JSON data if you'd like to integrate the data into your own web app. ...... the Computable Document Format (CDF). CDF is a browser plug-in that enables interactivity with charts, graphs, and other data. ..... an "extended keyboard" which is similar to the larger keyboard available on its mobile apps. This makes it easier to enter mathematical symbols without having to remember obscure keyboard combinations ...... Users will also be able to use images as inputs ...... if you uploaded a set of dates and prices, Wolfram Alpha will actually try to determine exactly what those prices represent. ...... put yourself in the mindset of a small business owner. Instead of trying to hassle with interpreting a spreadsheet of website traffic and sales data, he or she could upload it to Wolfram Alpha Pro ...... not just for the realm of academics and research. Regular users may not have had much reason to dig into the service before now, but the ability to bring the entire brunt of Wolfram Alpha's computational engine on any arbitrary piece of data democratizes the idea of statistical analysis.
I did not have to invent email to be able to use Gmail. There will be Big Data versions of Gmail. I as a user should be able to do Big Data stuff without launching a Big Data company. We will see much more of that happen. If anything Big Data will show up as a hugely democratizing force. We will realize every single human being literally sits atop an oil field. There is money to be made.
Once you have figured out that there are four screens - the phone, the browser, the desktop, the wall - it is easy to see search is pregnant territory, rich with possibilities. Search, content, distribution. There is so much to do.
Search is of special interest to me. There is one clear leader, but the challenger is not lacking in money. And for the leader the competition is but one click away. If there was ever an innovation challenge, this is it. Could Microsoft innovate, or find a startup or two that might? That second possibility is more likely. But then Google has been in competition with itself. It never stopped innovating in the search domain and boasts a larger index than anyone else. And its algorithms are still the ones to beat.
Microsoft should try and eat into Google territory. Google should try and eat into Microsoft territory. The consumer will benefit. Search and operating systems are fair game.
How Facebook Copes with 300 Million Users Technology Review Doing things in or near real time puts a lot of pressure on the system because the live-ness or freshness of the data requires you to query more in real time. ...... There's too much data updated too fast to stick it in a big central database. That doesn't work. So we have to separate it out, split it out, to thousands of databases, and then be able to query those databases at high speed. ...... "Like" became one of the most common actions in the system. ........ a tremendous wealth of photos being uploaded and shared ......... Then we went and built our own storage system called Haystack that's completely built on top of commodity hardware. Twitter's Growing Pains a large-scale, ground-up architectural revamp ...... it will reduce its reliance on Ruby on Rails, and will move to a "simple, elegant file-system-based approach," to replace its original unwieldy database system. ........ a communications-class technical infrastructure that supports unpredictable activity. Social Networking Is Not a Business How Facebook Works
I guess it makes sense for three small search players to gang up and see if they can dent Google's huge lead. But ultimately it is about the user experience. If Yahoo is at 20% and Bing at 10% and Wolfram Alpha at 1%, if they gang up, it is not necessarily true that the combined property will take 31% of the search market. Combined they are still but one product. And users are going to decide if they want to keep using Google for search, or they want to switch to this other product.
Bing has been more of a presentation of search results rather than core search innovation, but that still counts. And, boy, the marketing. I guess that is also innovation, just not in search.
Search is raw. There is so much room for growth and innovation. And Google knows that to be the case.
Search will remain the most exciting aspect of the web experience. Content creation and search will keep feeding on each other ad infinitum. Communication is important, but not the number one function on the web. It is content consumption. Search, search and more search.
Step one is conceptual. What would be the best possible formula? Twitter does not feel the need to index the entire web. The idea that because Google has the largest index of webpages and so it will always be number one has been challenged in ways small and big recently.
Twitter said no thanks absolutely to indexing. Wolfram Alpha said forget the 10 blue lines, let me get you straight to the answer. Bing said maybe we can't do better at search, and we are almost as good, but how about trying to beat Google on the presentation of search results? We are not a search engine, that would be Google. We are a decision engine, we will help you make better, faster decisions.
Disclosure: I have yet to visit the new Bing page, but I hope to shortly.
If you think about it, Google is like Twitter. Most links placed on the web are human decisions. I decide what sites and blogs and news articles and videos to link to from my blog. A purely machine oriented search engine would not care about who links to whom. It would be about how often those links are clicked on to generate visits to your site, to your page. But then depending solely on visits to rank a site might also not work. The most popular are not necessarily the best. Or we would all end up on the CNN site to learn about the latest in quantum physics.
If we could come with a great formula then we could ask, do we have the technology to deliver? Can we get it if we don't have it?
And that is not even getting into the niche search engines. You can limit to show your AdWords ads within a certain geographical region. You should be able to localize your search similarly. Localize in terms of space and time. Show me only pages that were created during the past hour on this topic. The past minute. The past 10 seconds. The past minute in Queens. On this topic.
Google beat the old search engines back in the late 1990s with its concept of PageRank. The more sites that linked to you, the more valuable was your site.
If something like real time search were to become possible, the concept of a dynamic pagerank would emerge. It would not be about how many sites linked to your site alone. It would be about do people actually click on those links to get to your site? Google's search algorithms have gone through so much evolution, and since they have been secret about it all for understantable reasons, it is hard to figure out what they have already done.
Google has been smart about constantly finetuning its search algorithms. They try to beat the so-called Search Engine Optimization people. It is a constant tussle.
Another thing would be content itself. After billions of search queries from people, Google should be able to figure out what sites and pages best delivered for what queries, and the number of search terms are for the most part finite. So if you can measure satisfaction, would that affect the way you do PageRank?
What about the content of the page itself? It might be a brand new page, but what if it is the most relevant page to my particular query? I guess search engines are not that good at reading yet.
Content creation and searching content will stick around for a long, long time.
And Bing's recent launch showed presentation is a whole new ballgame altogether. Microsoft decided they can't beat Google at its secret sauce of search, so they decided to take a bite at the other side of the coin: presentation of search results. Calling itself "a decision engine, not a search engine" was also a good marketing move.
They did not beat Google, but they did beat Yahoo, looks like. Now Bing is number two. Shoots for the stars, and you will get the moon.
Square your search results with Google SquaredGoogle Blog requiring you to visit ten, perhaps twenty websites to research and collect what you need. ..... I'd find roller coaster sizes on one website, heights on another, and speeds on a third. By manually comparing the sites, I could get the information I was looking for, but it took some time. With Google Squared, a new feature just released in Google Labs, I can find my roller coaster facts almost instantly. ....... As you remove rows and columns you don't like, Google Squared will get a fresh idea of what you're interested in and suggest new rows and columns to add. ..... Once you've got a square you're happy with, you can save it and come back to it later.
Wolfram Alpha says it is an answer engine, not a search engine. Microsoft's Bing says it is a decision engine, not a search engine. Yahoo wants to "kill those 10 blue lines." Twitter claims to have real time search. All such premises are enticing because search is so raw still.
And now we have Google clamoring with Google Squared. Google would also like some of the search buzz. Can you imagine?
Raw search is great. I like to know there are a million pages on the term I am searching. And raw search should stay the center of the action. But maybe Google would like to service an alternate version on the side to face the reality that most users don't go past the first page of search, and most certainly don't go past page 10. So they should go find many interesting ways to display the first 10 pages of search results. That would not be Google Squared, that would be Google to the power of 10.
Google still has the best search algorithms, and I still prefer "those 10 blue lines" to any other search display formats that I have seen. I like to do my own exploring. But for the sake of the consumer maybe Google wants to work as hard on display options as it has on search. It has been super at search and it started out super at display. The simple search results page had and still has its allure. But Henry Ford stuck to his generic model, and competitors created new niches by designing fancier cars.
Maybe Google does not want to keep the search market to itself and give the display market to others, especially when display is where the interaction happens with the end user.
I am going to argue search is still the wave of the future. Google Wave might/will become the new paradigm in communicating, collaborating, publishing even. But the aspect of the web experience that is still the most exciting, and still the most primitive is search itself.
Most of the knowledge I expect to consume in the future will not reside in my mind or in the minds of people I already know. If it did, Google Wave would be the only relevant destination. But we know that not to be true.
Search is like poverty, (Hunger, Vision, Money) it is not any one thing. It is a complex set of things, it is a phenomenon. It is many things, many layers, many dimensions. And Google stands to be challenged. The news is not that Wolfram Alpha is no Google killer. The real news is look how easy it was for Wolfram Alpha to get 100 million queries. (Wolfram Alpha: An Answer Engine, Not A Search Engine)
But just like the next big thing in communication/collaboration came from inside Google itself, it is very possible the next few big things in search will come from inside Google itself. It is very possible. But I am going to bet those next big things are going to come from small startup like teams inside the Google incubator rather than from Google Corporate. We will have to wait and watch.
From The Google Blogs
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build? Google Wave Developer Blog The Google Wave APIs come in two flavors: Embed and Extensions. With Embed, you're able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScriptAPI. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors. With Extensions, you're able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client. Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave. The Official Google Blog Search engineer stories Four years later, I'm still constantly awed by how challenging search is. We work on improving the entire search process, including formulating queries, evaluating results, reading and understanding information, and digging deeper with this new information. Every day we work on ways, both big and small, for search to be better, faster, and more effortless.
Kicking off 2nd annual Google I/O developer gathering New Logo Look Netlog integrates with Google Friend Connect Put the pedal to the metal with a faster Google Chrome Faster is better on Google Suggest Congratulations Eric Yang, winner of the 2008-2009 National Geographic Bee Announcing the 2009 Doodle 4 Google Winner Energized about our first Google PowerMeter partners Find out about the new creative trafficking Google I/0 2009 A galactic mentor Step into the spotlight with YouTube Insight The best and the brightest Behind the scenes of the Search Options panel Bike to Work Day 2009 This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern... Understanding health-related searches 30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo We have a Knol for Dummies.com winner! A planetarium in your pocket More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event 18th International World Wide Web Conference Energy and the Internet Announcing the 2009 Anita Borg Scholars and Finalists Vote for the national Doodle 4 Google winner A Mom's Day menu Google Chrome ads on TV The power of video Strengthening a worldwide community with Google Friend Connect The 2008 Founders' Letter By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. ..... the vast majority of our services are available worldwide and free to users because they are supported by ads ..... a child in an Internet cafe in a developing nation can use the same online tools as the wealthiest person in the world. I am proud of the small role Google has played in the democratization of information ..... In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search — nearly one per day. ...... Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that "understands" more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google's systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web — for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much "smarter" in the coming decade. ......... Today you can search from your cell phone by just speaking into it and Google Reader can suggest interesting blogs without any query at all. It is my expectation that in the next decade our searches and results will look very different than they do today. ........ via Google Groups we made available and searchable the most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings ever assembled (800 million messages dating back to 1981). ....... In the future, using enhanced computer vision technology, we hope to be able to understand what's depicted in the image itself. ......... Video is often thought of as an entertainment medium, but it is also a very important source of high-quality information. ....... Yet videos are also great resources for topics such as computer hardware and software (I bought my last RAID based on a video review), scientific experiments, and education such as courses on quantum mechanics. ....... Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube — the equivalent of 86,000 new full length movies every week. ......... (when Venezuelan broadcaster El Observador was shut down by the government, it started broadcasting on YouTube). ....... In the future, vast libraries of movie-theater-quality video (4000+ columns) will be available instantly on any device. ....... Books are one of the greatest sources of information in the world ........ Within a couple of years, Larry was experimenting with digitizing books using a jury-rigged contraption in our office. ........ Today, we are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. ....... millions of in-copyright, out-of-print books available for U.S. readers to search, preview, and buy online ......... increased access to users with disabilities, the creation of a non-profit registry to help others license these books, the creation of a corpus to promote basic research, and free access to full texts at a kiosk in every public library in the United States. ....... While digitizing all the world's books is an ambitious project, digitizing the world is even more challenging. ........ imagery, topography, road, buildings, and annotations. ....... After the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months. ......... the first self-service system known as AdWords launched in 2000 starting with 350 advertisers. ......... While these ads yielded small amounts of money compared to banner ads at the time, as the dot-com bubble burst, this system became our life preserver. ......... has helped democratize access to advertising, by creating an open marketplace where small business and start-ups can compete with well-established, well-funded companies ....... Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated more than $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners. ........ video ads within YouTube and dynamic ads on game websites. ....... match advertisers and publishers using the formats and mediums most appropriate to their goals and audience. .......... designed for power users with high volumes of email. ....... While our initial focus was on internal usage, it soon became clear we had something of value for the whole world. ........ Today some Googlers have more than 25 gigabytes of email going back nearly 10 years that they can search through in seconds. By the time you read this, you should be able to receive emails written in French and read them in English. ........ anywhere there is a working web browser and Internet connection ...... I am writing this letter using Google Docs. There are several other people helping me edit it simultaneously. Moments ago I stepped away and worked on it on a laptop. Without having to hit save or manage any synchronization ............ today I have worked on this document using three different operating systems and two different web browsers, all without any special software or complex logistics. ......... more than 1 million organizations use Google Apps today, including Genentech, the Washington D.C. city government, the University of Arizona, and Gothenburg University in Sweden. ......... Apps can change the way businesses operate and the speed at which they move. ........ with Google Apps Web Forms we innovated by addressing the key problem of distributed data collection, making it incredibly simple to collect survey data from within the enterprise — a critical feature for collecting internal feedback we use extensively when "dogfooding" all of our products. ......... We are working to shift all of our applications to a common infrastructure. ........ In the past couple of years, however, we decided that we wanted to make some substantial architectural changes to how web browsers work. For example, we felt that different tabs should be segregated into separate sandboxes so that one poorly functioning website does not take down the whole browser. We also felt that for us to continue to build great web services we needed much faster Javascript performance than current browsers offered. ............. a multiprocess model and a very fast JavaScript engine we call V8. ...... Chrome is not yet available on Mac and Linux so many of us, myself included, are not able to use it on a regular basis. ........ Today, the phone I carry in my pocket is more powerful than the desktop computer I used in 1998. ......... this year, more Internet-capable smartphones will ship than desktop PCs. In fact, your most "personal" computer, the one that you carry with you in your pocket, is the smartphone. ......... a third of all Google searches in Japan are coming from mobile devices ........ the ambitious goal of creating a new mobile operating system that would allow open interoperation across carriers and manufacturers. ........... To date, more than 1000 apps have been uploaded to the Android Market including Shop Savvy (which reads bar codes and then compares prices), our own Latitude, and Guitar Hero World Tour........... The past decade has seen tremendous changes in computing power amplified by the continued growth of Google's data centers. ..... Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs. ....... translated search where the query gets translated to another language and the results get translated back. .......... Google Flu Trends, a service that uses our logs data (without revealing personally identifiable information) to predict flu incidence weeks ahead of estimates by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). ......... can do even more — going beyond monitoring to inferring potential causes and cures of disease. ....... large data sets such as search logs coupled with powerful data mining can improve the world while safe guarding privacy. ........ Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing. New and amazing computational capabilities will be born that we cannot even imagine today. ..... While about half the people in the world are online today via computers and mobile phones, the Internet will reach billions more in the coming decade. ....... enable individuals, small groups, and small businesses to accomplish tasks that only large corporations could achieve before, whether it is making and releasing a movie, marketing a product, or reporting on a war.......... When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds.
Google is a search engine. Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine. Microsoft is a desktop company. Google is an internet company. Google is a search engine. Facebook is a social site.
Yahoo's boast of wanting to "kill those 10 blue lines" is on the vacant side. Microsoft wanting to rename and remarket an old search engine is not exactly challenging: where's the innovation? But Wolfram Alpha does kill those "10 blue lines." That is its strength and weakness.
100 million queries? Come on. That is prime real estate already. And the site was selling ad space before it launched. Smart. A sound answer engine and a sound business model: what else do you need to fuel growth?
It has a small database for now. But that will change as it makes more money and has more resources. But it is good enough now to make good money now.
Wolfram Alpha is not a Google challenger, I don't think so. But what if it were? Look at how fast it hit 100 million queries. That might be the real news. Google, be awake, be very awake. https://twitter.com/paramendra/status/1908944676
You know how you can watch a video clip on YouTube, and then you can get the code to embed that clip on to your blog? I wish this answer engine had a similar share/embed appendage.
But I guess you can always just plain link: New York.
Image via WikipediaThe Verge: Wolfram Alpha Pro democratizes data analysis: an in-depth look at the $4.99 a month service
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