It must be difficult for people to change habits since they rarely do. When they do, it often takes considerable effort and time for them to do so. Try quitting cigarettes. You can be successful if you want. We've witnessed resistance to change with the advent of Web Search through the 1990s when habit was that people entered one word for queries. Imagine the results for [nutrition]. Those who were fascinated, driven by one spirit or another, decided to make a career focussed on Web technology specifically search for many because it was interesting, challenging and fun. It has since been viewed as a 'cottage industry' for a long time. It hadn't been recognized for years, decades, as the likely hero of the 'dot bomb' or the recent economic woes. Search was there. Search is there. Search is fantastic. Search is useful. Above all, search has become highly profitable. So profitable in fact, that Microsoft is freaked out entering the game in the biggest way it knows how. Microsoft is using its economic strength, its monopolistic, ubiquitous tentacles, usurping what it can from new media: The Web Revolution. It's taken a huge bite out of Yahoo! after snapping its jaws at it more than once. If it didn't gobble up some search, Microsoft would know that the train which left the station an hour ago, Google, will reach the prize alone without any competition. Google would otherwise dominate the future of everything connected.
Scary thought? Who knows. Google is quite literally the greatest software maker ad agency of today. Its hosted applications, its open source nature have ensured that Google is more than the search engine we knew. The search engine we knew is now unfortunately so littered with redundant spam, commercialism and terrible noise that it stinks. Google is polluted. Google may not have started that way. I turned my mom onto Google back in 1999. Now the Google legos are dirty in the search area. They need way more than Matt Cutts can do. The only thing Google is good for anymore is hosted software like GMail, Maps, Calendar, Docs etc. Google has become a Microsoft Yahoo! combination itself. The new Yahoo! dropped its investment in search, just like Google's search is junk, will continue to be junk. Google is a software maker (operating system!) re-inventing itself as the new Microsoft, taking Yahoo!'s lead neglecting search. Microsoft may actually win the search prize in the end. Particularly if Microsoft squares off and does a deal with technologies like WolframAlpha. WolframAlpha is quite literally the future of search. Forget what you've heard from marketers about their jaded "future of search" (they don't know anything except selling, selling themselves, selling out). The future of Web Search is to have an accurate engine for your purposes, not bookmarks to all possible answers from unchecked third parties. That's only good for comparison shopping.
Let me be clear. Altavista was my old favorite. It leaned more scientific. I miss it something awful. I'm going to mash up something fun at AltaDisa one fine day. I hope you like what I end up doing. I don't have uncanny aspirations to be a search engine. I'll just do something fun. Please be patient but don't wait. The future of search is here now. Take another look at WolframAlpha. The reason marketers are ignoring its real threat is because it doesn't lead to client sites. Marketers can't make any money with it. Why pay it heed? It can't be good for search marketers. It's the albatross that threatens their business. On the other side of the coin, they are right to say it's not a search engine as people know search engines to be. True. It's not a list of spam sites that try to sell you something you don't need. If you want something commercial, you can always Google it, or whatever. You will hopefully discover it at a reasonable cost, or you can always use a comparison shopping search engine. You might even navigate to a manufacturer's site directly, (if you know how to spell it). That's all a good thing. Spelling is fairly important, by the way. People that can't spell, can't use WolframAlpha. Search engines the way we know them aren't going to entirely disappear because people who can't spell aren't very smart. They're a dime a dozen with a dozen dimes to spare too. Shopping search engines like Google and Become spell for you. I think these are the successful shopping sites of tomorrow. That's not the Future of Search. That's the Future of SEO. That's the future for ad agencies like Google. Become works with merchants too. Typos are way different. WolframAlpha interprets what it can. WolframAlpha shows us the future of search, now.
Wikipedia has become one of the top visited sites. They don't sell anything. It doesn't pay Google to send people to Wikipedia. People tried to spam Wikipedia and list their clients in Wikipedia. Luckily, with enough effort, the thing survived. Wikipedia continues to be useful today. It's still a top visited site. That's the sort of resource that people can count on. It's like Amazon versus Crazy Joe Electric's wide screen TV sale. You may pay more at Amazon. Amazon is a merchant you know is not likely to have a breach of security that threatens your credit card number. With Crazy Joe Electric (I made the name up by the way), the business operator might either sell you the TV for less, or sell you a stolen TV, or worse. Your credit card might get stolen and sold. You never know. Unless you know Joe personally, you're at the mercy of the Wild Wild Web. That's the trick of the Web. There's not a bona fide way to tell one thing or another about what you're reading. People get in trouble. There are Web ratings for merchants, which make it possible at all to buy things, or else no one but big-box merchants would be doing e-commerce at all.
Now take information. How many sites are out there to provide free access to information? News sites might even try to charge for access to content (Rupert Murdoch, AP comes to mind). Other sites display banners and text ads (Google!) to make the information pay for itself. Google is the biggest ad agency in the world. In my opinion, they are not a search engine anymore. They are a software maker / ad agency looking to eat your lunch. This is not the Web which was how the Web all started. This is the Web we know now, which has transformed into a commercial enterprise (not necessarily a bad thing). There is a caveat, however. People learn how to do interesting things wrongly, or misdiagnose themselves rushing to the doctor, or are otherwise somehow misled by the utter junk that can be found on the Web. They are misled by people who can't spell, people that exercise hate. It's all in Google. Just go to Google, Google it. You'll get all the junk I've been talking about. You'll get spam. You'll get hate speech. You'll get misinformation. You'll get phishing sites, drive-by downloads, hackers, crackers, whacks and weenies complaining about each other, ad-infinitum. Search engines were supposed to help us sort through the mess. Google is the mess.
Enter WolframAlpha. It's not a search engine as you know it per se. It's just accurate. Accurate is all that it is. If you can learn to enter queries correctly, it will provide you information without leading you to any junk. Junk is not possible. It has information on the most interesting (non-commercial) things in the universe, which is what the Web is really good for in the first place. It does it in a clean, sterile room without a hint, without a germ of commercialism. That makes it utterly useful. I am anxious to watch WolframAlpha continue to evolve. It answers like Hal 9000 (the machine Craig Silverstein of Google famously invoked at a 'Future of Search' panel at a marketing conference). WolframAlpha literally is the future of Web search here and now. It's just not like a search engine the way people are used to thinking about search engines. It reminds me of the feelings I had using Altavista a long time ago. It requires decipherable input (it's somewhat forgiving for that) in order to coax what you want out of it. Try the sample queries. Try the tutorials. In the very least, get the information out of it that is more important than price information on a new digital camera. If you are going to query for medical or nutritional information, anything scientific, if you ever thought to use computations in a query, WolframAlpha is the winner. I think it's the Future Alpha Search Engine. I used it today, too.
Stay tuned.
> The reason marketers are ignoring its real threat is because it doesn't lead to their client's sites, they can't make money with it.
Well, thats just the first step. All search engines are essentially stealing our content. With web search most of us accept this (although, not the newspapers and a few more - and they do win cases!) because they pay us - the content owners back in form of qualified leads. But with WA it's different. They just steal our content - they don't pay back. That is just NOT goin to fly!
What they do will NOT be legal under "fair use" - at least not here in Europe. Unless they find a completely different model they will never be able to grow - even if they can.
But I am not sure they can. I see WA as "an interesting lab". I the current form they will never get big ... No way. Its simple WAY WAY WAY to geeky to hit more than a minor fraction of average web users.
For over 10 years we have tried to teach average people how to search - and what have we accomplished? Not much, to be honest. OK, people search with a few more words now than they used to but thats really all. Most people still don't use any kind of advanced search and I don't think they ever will.
Better search will NOT come from teaching people how to do more geeky stuff - it will come from making it easier to do what average people can. People simply do not share the passion for search that you and I have Disa. We have to accept that :)
Thank you Mikkel. Yes. WA cannot be viewed as an opportunity for commercial success, either by Wolfram or SEO practitioners. It is not going to be used much except by pure geeks for now. Like email. Email was only used by the geekiest people in 1975. The Internet was only used by geeks until the advent of the Web. People didn't even know they're different, the Internet and the Web. They still don't. The Web made the Internet accessible to the general public. WA can evolve interpretation for computation search making itself more meaningful to the general public. That may is a long way off, why marketers shouldn't get scared about it. I get to use it in the mean time for my purposes. The data is publicly accessible, by the way. They are not stealing any content as far as I know. Google does, in a way. Not WolframAlpha. It's science-based readily accessible facts, or common information they use. It's the freedom of information in the purest form available today. That was my comment with this post more than anything else. You won't find spam or hate speech at WA like you do with Google et al.
> Not WolframAlpha. It's science-based readily accessible facts, or common information they use. It's the freedom of information in the purest form available today.
No, that is not entirely true. They do in fact grab informnation from websites that they do not have the rights to. One example is the weather information they grab from Denmark - this is commercial information, that the supplier sell. If WA ever grows they will get sued by them.
WA is "freedom of information" exactly the same way PirateBay is ... But that dosn't make it legal :)
Purest available insofar as search engines go. If they grab content that isn't available, then they will have to deal with it. They should come to a satisfactory outcome with the Danish commercial supplier of weather info. They should find a source to replace what they grabbed or find a way to pay for access. The majority of the engine is sourced by open access information. If they veer away from that, they will experience growth problems, surely. My piece is less about their growth. I wrote mostly about how I think WolframAlpha has changed the game in a way that I like. I think they are far better than anything out there. I always thought Google had a limited shelf-life for as long as they rely on links for rankings. Luckily for them they no longer do as much. Links are still key. Links will always be key for some things. Links are a measure of popularity and publicity. Perfect for shopping, comical news and finding burgeoning things in the chattering public. Links are too easy to game. Google has gotten into ad supported software in defense of what is likely coming next: Their search will soon no longer be very viable. They can crank up computation analysis like WolframAlpha has done with its launch. Google is distracted by its responsibility to its share holders, however. They have to chase the cash, not search.