The ultimate showdown Microsoft’s Kumo set to wrestle with Google

SEARCH ENGINES

HEDIRMAN SUPIAN, hedirman@mediacorp.com.sg

THERE has been plenty of buzz online about Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com), a unique online tool that tech pundits say could beat Google Search at its own game.

Unlike conventional search engines, Wolfram Alpha does not generate links to information from across the web to answer your search query. Instead, it tries to understand what you’ve asked and presents factual data from a database of curated content (currently only 10TB in size). Thanks to its algorithmic-rich backbone, Wolfram Alpha can present its results in tables, charts, diagrams and other visual means as an answer to your query. And there’s no guesswork needed to ascertain the data since it comes from valid sources.

Here’s what we found when we compared the results generated by Wolfram Alpha with other search engines.

Search: GDP of Singapore

>> Wolfram Alpha: In its results, Wolfram Alpha presented the 2007 estimate of our GDP (gross domestic product) and charted a useful graph of our country’s GDP growth overtime. It also displayed relevant information, like the country’s inflation and employment rates.

>> Google Search (www.google.com.sg): The first link on Google’s search results was a sponsored link by a bank — hardly useful. Next in line was a link to the website for the United State’s Central Intelligence Agency, which has Singapore’s 2007 GDP figures.

Search: Earthquakes in Indonesia

>> Wolfram Alpha: It displayed a graphic map littered with dots pinpointing the areas in Indonesia that are affected by earthquakes. The dots vary in sizes to illustrate the magnitude of the earthquake. With the aid of simple drop-down menus, you can filter the earthquakes by magnitude and by the period of time they occurred.

>> Yahoo (sg.search.yahoo.com): Related links to news stories from different media outlets formed the mainstay of Yahoo’s search results.

Search: Big Mac

>> Wolfram Alpha: It’s not localised yet, so Wolfram Alpha won’t recognise food items like rojak or nasi lemak. In fact, for a little surprise, see its response when you query this: “Do you speak Malay?” So, we fed McDonald’s almost universal Big Mac into Wolfram Alpha and were treated to a detailed list of the fast food’s nutritional values.

>> Microsoft Live Search (search.live.com): Two Wikipedia entries on the Big Mac made the top of the list on the search engine’s results, with the link to the official UK website for McDonald’s appearing at number three on the result list.

Search: Singapore weather in May

>> Wolfram Alpha: Not only did Wolfram Alpha state the average temperature and range of conditions, humidity and wind speed, it also provided charts indicating cloud cover and temperature.

>> rednano.sg (www.rednano.sg): The local search engine churned out a list of largely irrelevant results. Under its web results tab, it displayed a link to news stories on Indonesia and China, followed by a blog listing “wild happenings in singapore” while under its news results page, it listed links to technology-related sites. Huh?

Wolfram Alpha won’t quite render search engines obsolete. Its strength lies in providing you ways to crunch factual data and manipulate it to your liking. Because it lacks information on pop culture or news, users who try to use it like a conventional search engine might be disappointed.

This “computational knowledge engine” can be daunting because it isn’t very flexible with processing certain phrases or queries. We sometimes had to rearrange our queries to get the right results.

However, Wolfram Alpha holds much potential and is a step in the right direction for a web tool that serves as an encyclopedia on steroids.

Microsoft might be unveiling a new search engine next week. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Microsoft plans to demonstrate the search engine, code-named Kumo, at D: All Things Digital, a conference organised by the WSJ. Said to be a revamp of Microsoft’s Live Search, Kumo aims to provide a better web search experience by shortening and grouping search results into relevant categories.

From TODAYOnline.com, Tech – Friday, 22-May-2009; see the source article here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Keeps Gaining Search Share (gigaom.com)
• Universal: The New Information Baloney (arnoldit.com)
• Google Adds More Ads - This Time To Search 'Suggest' Function (paidcontent.org)
• In Wake Of Searchology, Yahoo Hosts Its Own Searchfest (paidcontent.org)
• Yahoo Search, As We Know It, Is Over (techcrunch.com)
• Why Are the Search Engines Fixing Something That's Not Broken? (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Drat. Wolfram Alpha May Not Be Revolutionary (arnoldit.com)
• Future of search may not be about indexes and algorithms (financegeek.com)
• Will Microsoft Kumo Fall Flat, Like Other MS Search Engines? (businesspundit.com)
• Twitter Search a Quitter (arnoldit.com)

Your personal e-analyst?

SEARCH ENGINES

New search tool Wolfram Alpha aims to complement, and not rival, Google

MILLIONS of web users have Google’s search engine as the homepage on their computer. It’s the first thing they see when they switch their machine on and their first port of call whenever they need to find the answer to a question.

Such is Google’s dominance of the search space that any attempt to launch a rival platform is often met with a mixture of bemusement and sympathy. The problem, as many companies quickly discover, is that it’s almost impossible to beat Google at its own game. Instead, what’s needed is a fresh approach to search which can supplement Google while also carving out its own niche.

That’s the strategy taken by Wolfram Alpha, a search engine that launches on Monday. It’s the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, a British physicist and former child prodigy who, in 1988, created the Mathematica computer program used by scientists, researchers and engineers to number-crunch huge volumes of complex data.

Wolfram Alpha is designed to provide clear answers to specific questions. For instance, a Google search for, say, the nutritional values of a Big Mac returns 123,000 results, which web users then have to sift through to find the facts they want. A similar search on Wolfram Alpha will, in theory, return a single answer, detailing the calories, fat content and salt levels in the McDonald’s burger.

That’s because Wolfram Alpha doesn’t crawl the web for its answer, as Google does. Rather, it searches its own huge database of factual data to find the correct information.

“Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle these kinds of things, and that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question and have it compute the answer,” says Dr Wolfram. “But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that. I always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realised I was finally in a position to try to do it.”

Indeed, says Mr Conrad Wolfram, Stephen’s brother and the project’s strategic director, creating the database that underpins the search engine has been a “huge undertaking”.

“It has taken three to four years to generate this database,” he says. “But because we use Mathematica to help structure this information, you could say we’ve been working on it for even longer.”

The secret, says Conrad Wolfram, is in the value that’s been added to this data. “We believe in human expertise, which is very different to traditional search - that relies much more on computer science to pick out results,” he says. “The database is a structured environment in which we’ve added meaning and computational knowledge to the data. This allows it to come up with an answer to the question a user asks.”

Much of the hype and speculation surrounding the launch of Wolfram Alpha has framed the website as a potential “Google killer”. But Wolfram Alpha is designed to be “highly complementary” to other search engines rather than a direct competitor, says Conrad.

“If you use a search engine, it’s a bit like a librarian who gives you a whole set of papers that you need to look through to get the answer. If you use Wolfram Alpha, it’s more like having your own personal analyst who takes the question you’ve got and tries to come back with a specific set of answers unique to your question.”

Wolfram Alpha, he says, will grow in accuracy and scope as more people use it. He says that experts will analyse aggregated, anonymised data about searches performed and the success rate of results, to learn how people are using the search tool and find ways of improving the service.

Drawing relationships between complex data has long been a holy grail for web developers. For years, companies have been working on building a so-called “semantic web”, in which data contained within webpages is labelled with keywords, or digital “tags”, to associate meanings to information and enable it to be interpreted in a wider context.

But that’s a difficult idea to implement. “It’s hard to get people to tag their data in this way, and no consensus has been reached on what tags to use, says Wolfram. “Our approach is different - to suck the data in so that we can structure it, curate it, tag it with meaning and make it computable.”

It is here that Wolfram Alpha could really make a name for itself, becoming a “destination website” for students and researchers seeking an easy way to distil complex information into manageable chunks, which can then act as a springboard for further research and discovery.

Even Google, the old master of web search, has seen the potential of this, launching a tool called Google Squared that allows users to type in a specific query - such as London boroughs, or United States Presidents - and receive a list of information that relates to that search term. For example, the list of London boroughs aims to list all boroughs alphabetically, along with links to relevant websites and information about population and the leader of the council. The results are presented in a grid, and users can remove columns of unwanted information or add a column of data they would prefer to see.

Wolfram Alpha, it seems, is ruffling a few feathers. “We’re at the start of a very long project,” says Conrad Wolfram. “We’re not going to have everything right to start with, but I think people will find Wolfram Alpha a very powerful system, and it’s going to get a lot more powerful still. Many new things will come over the months ahead.” THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

From TODAY, Tech; Friday, 15-May-2009

Related articles by Zemanta

• Can Wolfram Alpha take on Google? (telegraph.co.uk)
• Wolfram Alpha 'to launch on Monday' (telegraph.co.uk)
• Does Wolfram work? (bbc.co.uk)
• Wolfram Alpha: helpful or hyped? (sitepoint.com)
• Wolfram Alpha Launch Starts Tonight at 5pm Pacific: Here is What You Need to Know (readwriteweb.com)
• WolframAlpha - should Google be quaking in its boots? (timesonline.typepad.com)
• The Wolfram Alpha Launch (npharder.wordpress.com)
• Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites) (techcrunch.com)
• LIVE: The Wolfram Alpha Non-Launch (mashable.com)
• Google competitor Wolfram alpha launching this month May 2009: (mt-soft.com.ar)