Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Last Friday night I thought I would check out the soft release of Wolfram Alpha.  I was greeted with the following:

So they were running into some load issues, but then again they’re not your traditional search engine.  Wolfram Research is the software company behind Mathematica.  Mathematica is to a mathematician as the utility belt is to batman.  Suffice it to say, it’s pretty amazing software.  It came as somewhat of a surprise that the company was launching a search engine.  They are quick to denounce themselves as a Google replacement.  Search results in Alpha present more thoughtful and curated responses — if it knows what you’re asking.

As seen in their visual gallery, Alpha can inundate you with information, but it’s subjective if those results are useful or not.  A great example is, “United States“.  The information is fascinating, but I’m a little thrown off by lines of info such as “local currency conversion: $1 = $1“.  So where does Alpha win?  The value added is Alpha’s ability to understand your question.  Compare the results of the search “literacy rate of the United States” in Alpha and Google.  Alpha definitely gives the feeling of instant gratification.  Unfortunately, Alpha doesn’t know about the “Indianapolis Museum of Art” but at least they know “how many licks to the center of a tootsie pop“.

Google is not sitting idly by.  Announcing Google Squared:

Ok, so it needs some work.  Both Google and Alpha are proceeding with the same assumption though: “People are becoming better searchers”.  Google Squared will be a search system very similar to Alpha.  More importantly, Squared is going to be driven from semantic information.  The Semantic Web has been promised to revolutionize information online for many years now.  It was what many thought would be Web 2.0. — It’s looking more like 3.5 now. — In a nutshell, web pages can add additional information to convey the meaning of the content.  Search engines could use this information to better understand and relay this information.  Google does a good job of sending you to the right place now, but it is up to you and web providers to make sure you find what you were looking for next.  In a few years you might search for “operating hours of the IMA” instead of digging up the information yourself.  Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared are the first pushes to this mindset change.

• Tags: art blog, Charlie Moad, Google Squared, ima, IMA Blog, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Museum Blog, search engines, semantic web, Wolfram Alpha
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 8:20 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.