Posts tagged Search Engine
Wolfram Alpha goes live
May 16th
Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. And as we have discussed a lot about Wolfram Alpha, official launch is Monday May 18, and a sneak preview was presented about a month ago, now the company has said they plan a “soft launch” starting tonight, with access gradually becoming available to everyone throughout the weekend.
Wolfram told Danny Sullivan in Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine” that
We are not a search engine. No searching is involved here,
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.
In his post, Danny offered a comprehensive overview of Wolfram Alpha based on demos and his conversation with Stephen Wolfram. He wrote:
Wolfram Alpha is backed by Stephen Wolfram, 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.
Here all you have to do is just to enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.
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 deal 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.
I have seen one more thing that whenever you try to get more and more results regularly, Wolfram Alpha gives you the following sort of error.
New search features coming to Google Search
May 12th
Google the most powerful search engine of all time. Today Google will host a press event called Searchology, right after the two years after launching universal search. According to Google, the event will “offer an insider’s perspective on Search including recent search innovations. Speakers will include VP of Search Engineering, Udi Manber, and VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer.”
Even if you didn’t get an invitation, you’ll be able to see the presentations through a webcast.
Who: Google Inc.
What: Live webcast of Google’s upcoming Searchology press event to be held at its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters.
When: Tuesday, May 12th, 10:00am – 11:30am PDT
There is no information about the product launch or anything else, but it is suspected that the search engine will include some new features that have been tested in the past months. Google wants to expose some advanced search options that allow you to refine the results without opening a new page. The options are available in a sidebar that’s collapsed by default, but it can be expanded by clicking on “Search options”.
You’ll be able to restrict the results to forums, videos, reviews and recent pages. There’s an option that lets you customize the snippets by making them longer or by showing thumbnails. Google wants to make the process of refining queries more fun and exploratory by adding a “wonder wheel” of suggestions.
A Sneak preview of Wolfram Alpha
Apr 25th
As it was announced about a month ago that Wolfram alpha will be available in May 2009. Some of us thought that Wolfram is Google killer, even I thought the same but case is different, Wolfram is more knowledge based search engine. Flash news says that Wolfram will go public on Tuesday, that is April 28th 2009.
According to the Wolfram Aplha Team:
Plans were announced this week for Stephen Wolfram’s first public presentation of Wolfram|Alpha. He’ll be giving a sneak preview of his computational knowledge engine at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, April 28. If you cannot attend the presentation in person, we invite you to participate in the live webcast
More details are available here.
Event details is below:
Tuesday, April 28, 3:00 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School
RSVP Required via the form here.
This event will be webcast live at 3:00 pm ET.
Participants in this event are Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law.
Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, the author of A New Kind of Science, and now the creator of Wolfram|Alpha. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research.
Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and served as its first executive director from 1997-2000.
For your General/Logistical questions? Email here.
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