British search engine 'could rival Google'

[kropotkin]

It isn't very good yet.
Try to get a graph of UK median income

 

[kyser_soze]

Just asked it for a graph of UK inflation and interest rates 1989-2009 and it gave me nothing. Meh.

 

[teuchter]

I asked it about Inverness and it told me the population is 40,755.

Official statistics say it's 71,579.

And I just asked it about Brixton and it gave me some share prices.

 

[teuchter]

.

 

[cybertect]

I asked it about Inverness and it told me the population is 40,755.

Official statistics say it's 71,579.

I think the difference can be accounted for. The lower figure is for the city of Inverness, the higher one is for the entire council district.

http://wwwold.highland.gov.uk/plintra/iandr/cen/pop_towns.htm

http://wwwold.highland.gov.uk/plintra/iandr/cen/prof_inv.htm

The Wolfram answer I got certainly specifies it as 'city population'

 

[Divisive Cotton]

I'm asking for the population of Romford or Essex and its giving me figures for places in the US

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I'm asking for the population of Romford or Essex and its giving me figures for places in the US

you must have an odd IP

 

[editor]

Interesting article here:

How the hell does Wolfram Alpha work?

Massive database

It all starts with the database. Wolfram Alpha has access to many trillion elements of data covering topics from maths to nutrition, physics to music, weather to anagrams.

Some of this data arrives in real time. Ask for a share price, for instance, and you'll get a value that's no more than a minute old (if the relevant exchange allows it, anyway).

STOCK INFO: Wolfram Alpha has extensive data on stocks and shares going back many years

But most data is input through a more complex, part automated, part manual system. The first step comes in choosing sources. There's no general automatic input from the web here: instead Wolfram Alpha staff work with experts in different domains to decide which sources are the best.

This has produced some impressive results, the company doing special deals with the owners of proprietary databases that they believe are important, delivering access to information that wasn't previously available online.

The data then goes through an automated procedure to clean and check it. And after that it's verified by real-life experts (some on the Wolfram Alpha staff, some outside) to confirm that it all seems reliable.

This all seems rigorous enough, and you can certainly understand the need to be careful. After all, just one or two stories of inaccuracies in Wolfram Alpha would be enough to undermine its reputation.

But what if you're researching something where there's disagreement, like how dangerous it is to breath in second hand smoke, or the number of civilian casualties in Iraq in the past few years? Here the source is everything. Wolfram Alpha will tell you where its data comes from in any response, but if it doesn't use a good range of sources then you may not get the full picture.

Mathematica

A large database is just the start. The real value in Wolfram Alpha comes from how all this information can be organised and related.

Take colours, for example. Wolfram Alpha's creators taught the system various facts about "red", including that it's represented by the code #FF0000 in HTML. But they also added an additional algorithm explaining that two colours can be combined to produce a third, which is why entering a query like "red + yellow" will display orange as a result.

The process continued with the creation of many more algorithms, each providing a little more real world understanding of how data can be used. And the complete set were then implemented in Mathematica, another Stephen Wolfram project, using 5 to 6 million lines of program code.

If you're trying to create models that cover all real world knowledge then five to six million lines really isn't a lot, but in part this is because the Mathematica programming language offers many built-in shortcuts....

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/how-the-hell-does-wolfram-alpha-work--599561

 

[teuchter]

I think the difference can be accounted for. The lower figure is for the city of Inverness, the higher one is for the entire council district.

http://wwwold.highland.gov.uk/plintra/iandr/cen/pop_towns.htm

http://wwwold.highland.gov.uk/plintra/iandr/cen/prof_inv.htm

The Wolfram answer I got certainly specifies it as 'city population'

The ones you link to are from 2001 though. And it doesn't even tally with those. I think it must be working on rather out of date information.

 

[kropotkin]

It cannot answer any question I ask it. It isn't very good yet- although a very interesting direction to move in.

 

[fogbat]

Something Awful takes on Wolfram Alpha

 

[Hocus Eye.]

There was a brief item on WolframAlpha on Radio 4 yesterday. They started off by calling it a 'search engine'. It is not a search engine, although it looks similar. It is a database of numerical information. Later they asked if it was free and if it could be put on 'ordinary computers'. There was somebody demonstrating it to them in the studio, presumably on an ordinary computer. Also it has been online since last Friday and lots of people including me have accessed it.

Why do news reporters have to show their ignorance in front of an 'expert' when he comes to do an interview. They only needed to have spent 10 minutes or less on the internet in preparation for the interview, including using Wolfram themselves. They could then have asked more interesting questions.

It is not the lack of technical or scientific knowledge of reporters than annoys me, it is the lack of basic curiosity.

 

[Gromit]

I typed in What is the meaning of life? It gave me an answer.

It knows the answer to life the universe and everything. What more do you want?

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

Something Awful takes on Wolfram Alpha

glorious

 

[Paul Russell]

I was born 15 763 days ago. Sort of depressing to find that out...

 

[magneze]

Was trying this today. It seems you have to ask very specific things and know how to phrase the question. Not really all that useful to the general public IMO. The beauty of Google et al is that you can just punch in some crap and get something possibly useful.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

yes wolfram is a very interesting and powerful tool that answers specific questions

but it's not a stepping off point for web exploration like google is



from something awful

 

[Jonti]

Yeah, it's an expert system, not a search engine.

 

[jayeola]

how the fsck does one pronounce "Cuil"?


added

About Cuil

Cuil (pronounced COOL) is a search engine that combines the ...

 

[bi0boy]

It's shit, it only uses human-prepared material so is currently limited to what it's editors have told it rather than being able to search the web for clues itself.

It couldn't even attempt the basic question I asked it which is the sort of thin i'd have thought it would have been good at:

"volume of gas from 1kg of co2"

It suggested to try "volume of gas" which came up with:

volume of shares traded over the past year in NICOR, Chicgao's gas supply company.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

it's an itresting way of presenting data fast

however it's all a bit 42

you really need to understand the question your asking and know waht kind of answer your expecting

 

[Mrs Magpie]

I just watched the video demo - it's awesome, really really cool, and looks to be operating in a completely different space from Google.

So much so that every search I've tried on it has thrown up stuff that is very far removed for what I was looking for. I'm seriously underwhelmed so far.