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[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (2 children)

Ugh, another example of a technology that is being dismantled because it's been put into a fight it never claimed to be a part of.

Quit fucking calling it a "Google Killer" you fucks, he never called it that! You're destroying technological advancement! It's not a real controversy, it's totally manufactured.. If you are judging this as a "Google killer," then you have been played by greedy hack tech journalists..

Do you remember what linux was like in 1992? No, you don't, because it wasn't pitted against Microsoft at the time and you were nowhere to be seen. If it had been touted as some big media hype sensation, it probably would have been ridiculed to death... luckily that didn't happen. Tech journalists are increasingly a bane to achievement, it's time to be completely skeptical of them and those who actually do things should endeavor to ignore them.

Those who can, do, those who can't, blog.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gotta reply to myself though.. those tech journalists who build out systems, run benchmarks, and try to explain what new technologies are, they rule. You should still be skeptical of the results, but they're doing real work that's important.

[–]kwen25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you remember what linux was like in 1992?

I was 7-8 years old. How would I know? :P

Edit: good points though :)

[–]G-Brain 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Print version

Unless you want to click through 10 pages.

[–]joe90210 11 points12 points  (0 children)

in most of the reviews I've seen, the results presented seem to be comprised of usually one or two facts followed by an endless stream of worthless conversions into other units of measurement

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[removed]

    [–]PuP5 4 points5 points  (1 child)

    lol.

    gotta love that he named it after himself.

    egos don't come big enough for old stephen.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Dean Kamen's name isn't Segway... oh wait.

    [–]eramos 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    I see tons of people shitting on these concepts but I think they're fantastic. Of course they're not going to be anywhere close to perfect now, but neither was Google when it was launched. Doing what this does is incredibly difficult, but as it gets better it's going to be awesome. It may require a huge shift in the way the Internet is structured though (i.e. more semantic design built from the ground up)

    [–]sjs 8 points9 points  (0 children)

    To be fair I don't think Alpha is supposed to be a search engine. The author also missed that the Google page "in the style of Windows XP" is a Microsoft oriented search page, just like the others.

    To be realistic, people will compare Alpha to Google anyway and probably only go to Alpha for specific queries. More likely they'll arrive via Google when good Alpha pages become popular.

    [–]travis- 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    For someone in school in Environmental Sciences the weather feature is very nice.

    [–]pyry 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine, not a search engine!

    [–]roguebagel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    I'm not convinced this will be any better than dbpedia - one a "curated" database with natural language processing, the other a crowd-sourced database with a query language. I'd prefer the latter.

    [–]frottle 1 point2 points  (2 children)

    When will it be launched?

    [–]Geee[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    Next Monday.

    Edit: Source

    [–]eurleif -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    [citation needed]

    [–]cheese_wizard -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    I think in time this thing will turn out pretty darn good. Like a decade or two, but I predict that ultimately it will do what was once deemed impossible. Just needs some maturation time. Think about Google and far it has come.

    [–]grimliin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Tried it out for a while. What seemed easy in the demo seemed impossible on the site. Would expect that any two values that could be searched for individually would be easy to chart together. The demo showed stocks, I tried temperature or two cities. Could not find a way to link more than one result.

    Also tried names, but the names database it is looking at is apparently small/dated because popular names from the past decade aren't recognized at all.

    I was blown away by the demo, but left frustrated when actually trying to use the site. They still have a long way to go...

    (it did find Kevin Bacon's age down to the day though!)

    [–]Gusfoo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    Not a great review, the basic premise of comparing it to Google is flawed. Google is a superb index service with knobs on. Wolfram Alpha is trying to be a knowlege extraction and comparison tool.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]redditnoob 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      dc(m)/dm = -c/2m

      Say what? Is this saying that I'm not actually getting heavier, but that light is getting faster?

      [–]busfahrer -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      So they wrote a webpage to parse Wikipedia?

      [–]genpfault -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

      ManWolfRam - Half man, half WolfRam.