Wolfram Alpha: A new way to search the web… or is it?

Many of us have heard about the new search engine Wolfram Alpha (made by the same folks who are behind Mathematica, the computational software used in mathematical, engineering, and scientific fields). The new search engine only came online yesterday, but has been hyped up for quite a while now. Even before it was open for the public, some people called it “the Google Killer”, even without using it themselves, but only based on some articles and demonstrative preview videos released by the developers.

So now that it’s out in the open, what is Wolfram Alpha? The new search engine calls itself a “computational knowledge engine“. The basic idea is that you type something in the search box and hit the search button. The engine does not return a list of answers as most other search engines do. Instead, it presents facts about the search term(s), summarized and organized in a way that is easy to understand at a glance. The search terms could be anything. For example:

• Canada population: will display the population of canada, and charts how it changed over a period of time
• Moscow rome: displays some facts about the two cities, including a comparison of their populations, time zones, the distance between them, flight time, etc.
• A calculation (e.g. $250+15% or 4.5*log(pi/2)): The engine will compute the answer, and display the entered formula using the actual mathematical terms (e.g. replacing pi with the Greek symbol, using proper fractions, etc.)
• A math formula (e.g. x^2 sin(x)): The engine will plot the curve of the formula, compute its roots, and display tons of related information (its derivative, integral, local minimum and maximum, etc.)
• and more..

Granted, I think Wolfram Alpha has a neat way of summarizing facts into a nice presentable manner, not to mention the mathematical capabilities (solving equations, plotting functions and expressions, etc.). I admit, this is a major strength, which is not surprising, given the background of Wolfram research. However, I personally think it is far from being a Google killer. In fact, the two engines are totally different in the way they operate, and the information they return.

The down-side: lots of the searches return no results. Some of the searches would return nothing, but if you navigate through the categories then repeat the search, then you’ll get a result. This is a flaw in my opinion, and it makes it hard to simply search for something from the main search box. The engine makes up for its lacking database by providing a link to “search the web”. However, the link is hidden in the bottom left corner and may not be seen unless someone is actually looking for it.

In my opinion, I think the only real edge that Wolfram Alpha has is the mathematical power. No other free online tools can solve complex equations, plot formulas and functions, or provide this much related mathematical information. If the folks behind this engine want to improve on it, I think they should focus more on this aspect, to make it stand out even more.

Although the summarization and presentation of information is neat, I don’t think there is real use to it (besides playing and just seeing how cool it is). For someone looking for some fast information, any existing search engine will probably do the trick. If the user actually wants to research something and get all the facts in a way that makes sense, there is no way to trust the results presented by Wolfram Alpha, especially since it does not offer any information as to the source of these results (which would be required in any self-respecting research).

Finally, Wolfram Alpha is definitely not a Google killer. It is yet another tool for web surfers to add to their toolbox. It is yet to be seen whether it survives and grows to be an actual competitor, or it withers and dies. Either way, it will definitely give the existing search engines something to think about in terms of summarizing and presenting results.

Update: I just found out something that confirms my expectation of Wolfram Alpha’s limited use. The Wolfram Alpha Terms of Use state that “The free Wolfram Alpha service is available for ad hoc, personal, non-commercial use only”, and that users must attribute results produced by using Wolfram Alpha to the company, and that failing to do so may constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright. I totally agree with Thomas Claburn that the facts (which is what the service provides) cannot be copyrighted. This is like using Microsoft Excel to produce some summarized tables of some information, then having to attribute these results to Microsoft. This restriction will only limit the potential usefulness of Wolfram Alpha.

Browser Wars

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…
No wait!! That’s another set of wars that we are talking about here, one that does not involve lightsabers and droids. According to Wikipedia, the term “Browser Wars” refers to the competition for dominance in the Web browser marketplace. So far, there has been two major browser wars:

Browser War I (late 1990s)

Main opponents: Netscape Navigator (aka Netscape Communicator) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE)

Highlights:
In order to compete, the two browsers kept on adding features to one-up each other. Each browser had its own implementation of JavaScript (which were not compatible). Each browser had its own set of supported non-standard HTML tags. Adding new features had higher priority over fixing bugs, which resulted in both browsers being somewhat unstable.

Microsoft delivered the winning blow by integrating Internet explorer with its Windows operating system, which made the browser readily available to every Windows user – a move that was broadly criticized.

Effect on the Web experience:
BW-I was a time of Web chaos: shaky Web-standards compliance, frequent browser crashes, and many security holes. It was hard to design Web-sites that could behave similarly on both browsers, and thus it was common for Web designers to display ‘best viewed in Netscape‘ or ‘best viewed in Internet Explorer‘ logos. Some Web-sites even went as far as to work only on one browser or the other. This was indicative of the divergence between the “standards” supported by the browsers and signified which browser was used for testing the pages.

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Browser War II (2003 – present)

After Netscape was defeated, they open-sourced their browser code, which led to the formation of the Mozilla Foundation — a community-driven project to create a successor to Netscape. After several years, the new browser “Firefox” was born (version 1.0 was released on 9 November 2004). Since then it has continued to gain an increasing share of the browser market, and became the main competitor against Internet Explorer.

Other contenders joined the war at different points in time, including (but not limited to) Opera, Safari, and the most recent contender, Google Chrome.

BW-II differs from BW-I in a major aspect: The contenders try as much as they can to work under the umbrella of the Web-standards. All browsers have compatible JavaScript engines (except for minor differences), and support more-or-less the same set of widely-recognized HTML (or XHTML) tags. Whenever a new feature is added to a browser, it soon becomes an expected feature in all the others (e.g. tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, phishing filters, etc.). The contenders compete mainly in the following areas:

• Browser speed (the time it takes to load pages)
• Resource usage (amount of Memory and CPU needed)
• Stability
• Security (vulnerability to malicious code, holes that can be exploited, etc.)

Until the moment of writing this post, Internet Explorer still has the major market share, but the other browsers (particularly Firefox) are more popular particularly within the IT industry professionals because of serious security flaws in IE, in addition to some of the unique features provided by the other browsers (e.g. Firefox’s support of custom extensions, and the multitude of such extensions available online, which makes it possible to personalize the browser to each user’s needs). Also, IE seems to be falling behind in terms of browser speed. In a recent browser benchmark comparison done by gHacks.net, IE proved to be the worst among all tested browsers.

Effect on the Web experience:

Unlike BW-I, the current browser war is proving to be in the best interest of the user. The competition is bringing out the best of all competitors, and providing more and more features that help enrich the Web experience. The majority of Web sites today behave exactly the same on all Web browsers, and it is considered a design-flaw if a Web site does not work correctly on a certain browser. Tools are available to encourage (and sometimes enforce) using only the recognized Web-standards when designing a Web site. These standards have been vastly extended since the first browser war, and supporting non-standard elements is no longer an issue.

Fantistic Contraption…When Physics can be Fun!!!

While skimming through various blogs, I came across a very interesting post on the How-to Geek. The post was about yet another online flash game, but this time it is based on physics and puzzle solving, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Fantastic Contraption turned out to be an extremely fun game to play. The objective of the game is to move the red object (usually a circular object, but sometimes other shapes) to the red area (called the “goal”). Sometimes there are some obstacles in the way. To achieve the goal, you have to build a “contraption” using the tools at the top of the screen, and use this contraption to move the red object to the goal area. To make things even harder, you can only build your contraption within the light blue area (the workshop).

The games with a large number of levels, each of which has a different arrangement of objects. One good thing about this game is that you don’t have to proceed through the level sequentially. If you find yourself stuck at a particular level, you can go to the main menu, and play a different level of your choosing.

You can also save your contraptions (in mid-level, or after you’ve solved the level), but you have to create an account in order to do this (which is free). You will be given a link that you can share with others so they can directly see your contraption in action. You can also upload your contraptions to the server. Once you solve a level, you can view contraptions built by other users for that particular level. Here are some of the contraptions I’ve built (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O). I am not listing them in level order, or even including the level, so that I don’t spoil your experience with the game.

Warning: The game is very addictive, so make sure you don’t lose track of time while playing it.
Have fun!!

Building a New Computer

Although many people are already experts when it comes to building a new computer from scratch, many others are still a bit intimidated by the concept of looking for each component, and putting everything together. For those who actually want to know how to build a computer, the computer help website “The How-to Geek” has put up an excellent tutorial about building a computer from scratch.

The tutorial is mainly divided into five parts (the titles are self-explanatory):

• Part 1: Choosing Hardware
• Part 2: Putting it Together
• Part 3: Setting it Up
• Part 4: Installing Windows and Loading Drivers
• Part 5: Tweaking Your New Computer

The tutorial is very thorough, and full of pictures and screen-shots which makes it even easier to read and follow. If you are interested to learn about building computers, make sure to check it out.

The Best Freeware List

For those, like me, who love free software (who doesn’t?), it can be hard sometimes finding a good piece of software that does a certain task, especially since these freeware products appear and disappear all the time. This is one scenario that has happened to me personally too many times: I find a nice freeware program, and I use it for a long time. Then at some point, I recommend it to someone, only to find that it has now become a commercial software (and not free anymore), so I have to go and try to find a good freeware product to replace it. If this has ever happened to you, then you know what I mean.

That’s why I was very glad when I found Gizmo’s Tech Support Alert. This site offers a list of the top freeware products out there. It is classified into categories like:

• Security / Privacy / Encryption
• Internet: Email / IM / FTP / File sharing / Download managements
• Enhancements to Windows / Desktop
• Computer maintenance / Performance
• System utilities / Backup / Data recovery
• Audio / Video / CD / DVD
• … and more.

Each category is further divided into subcategories for easy navigation. Each sub-category usually features 3 or 4 products, with a full review showing the pros and cons of each product, so that the reader can make an informed decision of which product to use. The list is also updated constantly, removing products that are not freeware anymore, and adding new software that just proved itself to be worth mentioning. The website also provides a free monthly newsletter (with a paid version that has more stuff in it), and a forum where visitors discuss freeware programs and computer problems.

This site used to be a lone effort by Ian “Gizmo” Richards, who created and maintained a highly popular list of the “46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities”, but over time that list grew well beyond 46 and reached the point where it could not be maintained by one person. So, now the website has changed to wiki-style, where it relies on the contribution of dozens of volunteer editors who edit and moderate suggestions from thousands of site visitors. As a result the range of software covered is ever increasing and quality of the reviews ever improving. In some sense, some might think of it as a Wikipedia for Freeware.

At this point, whenever I am looking for a software product in a certain category, this is the first place to check. I wonder how many others do the same. Again, the URL of the website is http://www.techsupportalert.com