Thursday, May 21, 2009

Search engine war hotting up

The new WolframAlpha search engine has now been launched. WolframAlpha's stock in trade will be answering questions in plain English, and making the most amazing computations I have seen from data of all kinds.
From the introductory video, this is shaping up to be a serious contender to knock Google off its perch - the potential capabilities are a quantum leap ahead of anything we have seen in a search engine up to now. But it's not there yet. For instance, it could not come up with an answer to my query, "what happened on 15 August 1945?" (Of course, you and I know that was when Japan surrendered.) And its NZ-related data is almost non-existent. But I suspect these shortfalls will be quickly remedied.
Meanwhile, according to PC World, Microsoft is within days of releasing a major overhaul of its search engine, codenamed Kumo.

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