I've long held the view that - for all of Google's brilliance at searching - in its simplest form that really is all it's doing. Looking through vast quantities of flat data for matches to what you have asked. Over time, I've learned to tailor my searches to what I imagine someone might have written into a page, to increase the likelihood of a match.
For example, I recently wanted to know whether Solid-State Hard Drives are actually better than Hard Disk Drives. Rather than asking in the usual human natural-language form of "are solid state drives faster than hard disk drives?", I had to formulate it as "Solid State Vs Hard Disk" and "Solid State Drive round-up", since this is the sort of page/article that other users write.
There's an inherent problem with this sort of system. You have to learn a method to do something you already know how to do a lot faster. i.e. learn a new way to ask a question to get the answer. This type of system historically gets overtaken by one that is more in-tune with what is natural to us. A recent example is - for all their incredible power - the suprising loss of market share that Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3 have lost to the comparitavely simplistic Nintendo Wii (As of 9th March 2009: Wii - 48.9%, compared to 29.7% X360 and 21.4% PS3. Source VGChartz.com). Why is this? My belief is because the Wii is developed as an extension of the player. There's very little learning involved; certainly not of the scale of the 14-button combos that the PS3 needs to do things (and even then it's "square, triangle, cicle..." - who the hell thinks in shapes?!
My longest running Human Computer Interface belief that I've held ever since I started A-levels in computing when I was 16, is that 2 of the biggest inhibitors to our progression with computers; the thing that is holding us back the most from seeing computers as invisible tools, is the keyboard and mouse. The mouse is slowly being evolved with exploration of virtual gloves etc. But the keyboard. Jesus. I don't know about you but I certainly don't think 1 word as a time, let alone 1 letter at a time, so using a keyboard to interact at that speed is a major barrier. Professor Kevin Warwick, Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading wrote a great book, I, Cyborg, which is well worth the read to see how interactions really can begin to lead.
So, digression aside. What does all this have to do with Wolfram Alpha? Well, in short, it doesn't return search results created by scouring a huge list of indexed data at lightning speed. Instead, it actually computes answers to your needs based on knowledge. Wonderfull put in the Slashdot article, consider this:
Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for COMPUTING answers to questions about what we as a civilization collectively know.
Realise that it's not a
general search engine. Google and the like still have a very important role to play. But we lack a centralised resource from which to tap into our global knowledge as a species, over our history. I considered this just the other day when I was watching a great programme about Victorian cooking methods and how they are teaching us things. It struck me how crushingly sad that is. The Victorians spent generations learning things that we're now having to relearn. Wolfram will contain the formal data models we know that govern science (physical laws and properties), weather, music, people). Try to imagine that you will be able to ask it "Did John Lennon die before or after Jimi Hendrix" and it doesn't go off searching for a page where someone has written that or something similar. Instead, it
knows when each of them dies from it's data sources about them, understands the question and formulates a response. Just as we do.
I can't express how exciting this sort of thing is to me. Most people think we already have digital; they know all about the Internet. Thing is, given that there are seemingly no boundaries to it, how can we? For all we know, we're in the first few decades of something that will continue and grow for the lifespan of Humanity. that, essentially, we're at the 'crawl out of Primordial ooze stage' of its development without realising it. Ouch, head-f*ck. It's understandable; I'm sure all civilisations think they are at the pinnacle. I guess they are. For the second it takes to say the sentence.
Read the full article, Wolfram Alpha is coming - and it could be as important as Google on Slashdot.
