Wolfram Alpha – A Google for Smart People That Might Need a New Name if it Lives Up to the Hype
Go check out this story from the Independent on a search engine being released later this month by Stephen Wolfram. My favorite part is that is popular culture is, for now, an issue:
Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. The term “50 Cent” caused “absolute horror” in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week.
“We have a certain amount of popular culture information,” Dr Wolfram said. “In some senses popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can find out who’s related to who and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other concepts.”
The article mentions no other name for the technology than “Wolfram Alpha.” Not known for his humility, Dr. Wolfram may want to consider a catchy name for the product other than a moniker built on his own. Google is not just omnipresent, it has changed our language. How many times a day do you hear, “I Googled it,” or “Google it.” It rolls off the tongue.
“I Wolframed it,” or “I Alphaed it?” No so much.
[...] Wolfram Alpha – A Google for Smart People That Might Need a New … (allthatnatters.com) – May 03, 2009Go check out this story from the Independent on a search engine being released later this month by Stephen Wolfram. My favorite part is that is popular. [...]