Netizen: Wolfram Alpha

Showing posts with label Wolfram Alpha. Show all posts

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It

Real time search would be if I took my website public right now, and it would show up in your search results right now, if I put out a blog post right now, it would show up in your search results right now. That would be real time search.

But that is not what Twitter does. What Twitter does is this. If you created a website two years ago, but I only discovered it today, and it moved me enough that I tweeted a link to it, and once my tweet has been published, then my tweet would show up for someone doing a search on the key terms in my tweet if my tweet is not too old already. If I am 20 seconds too late, my tweet is not going to show up in Twitter's so-called real time search. And the Twitter search engine is really bad at digging into the Twitter archives, so if my tweet on that hot webpage from two years ago is not going to show up in the first 20 seconds, that tweet is pretty much buried.

Even by its own paradigm - as in, they don't claim to be indexing webpages created in real time - Twitter is not really doing real time search.

The online population is not representative of the global population.
The Twitter millions are not representative of the online population.
There are no guidelines to tweets. They can be about links, they need not be about links. They need not be about links to fresh websites, blog posts.

Twitter is useful, and I am a fan and an avid user. But the Twitter way of exploring the web is niche, it is you saying show me what others are seeing and saying right now. I guess that fits some people's definition of real time search, not mine though.

My blog posts get indexed by Google not in real time, but it does not take them long at all. I have not conducted experiments, but I doubt it is more than an hour. Maybe it is less than 30 minutes, less maybe, I don't know. It might even be minutes. If it is minutes, that is fast enough for me. That is real time search right there.

Of all the companies in the game - Google, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha, Yahoo, Microsoft - the one most likely to deliver real time search - my definition - is Google, because they have the most sophisticated algorithms, they have the largest database of web content, they focus on search like a laser beam like no company does.

So I am not counting the big dog out yet, although I am keenly interested in niche developments like Twitter and Wolfram Alpha, and I think it is good for the consumer that Yahoo and Microsoft harbor ambitions of competing with Google. I like the idea.

Distributed Search
Wolfram Apha Is Cool
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Taking The Number 2 Spot On Google Search For Donut Android
Google Is Working On Search
Ggoats
Stream 2.0: The Next Big Thing?
Microfinance, Nanotech, Biotech, Software/Hardware/Connectivity
David Gelernter: Manifesto
Twitter Is Not Micro
Cupcake: Android 1.5
Skype: Hub

Distributed Search

Image via Wikipedia

Silicon Valley VCs Don't Want Obama's Money, Think Google Is Passe CNet "The triumph of the distributed Web." ....... the aggregate power of distributed human activity will trump centralized control. ........ Google, and other search engines that analyze the Web and links, are much less useful than a (theoretical) search engine that knows not what people have linked to (as Google does), but rather what pages are open on people's browsers at the moment that people are searching ........ "All the problems of search would be solved if search relevance was ranked by what browsers were displaying" ......... the future is "federated search," in which the Web's users don't just execute search queries, they participate in building the index by the very act of searching, immediately and directly. ............you probably also want to know what's showing up on users' computers in apps other than the Web browser. ....... the value of real-time searching, as well as social-network-aware searching, will increase dramatically and quickly. .......... the United State's subsidies on ethanol, France's decision to skip the Internet in favor of the state-sponsored Minitel, and Japan's direct investment in supercomputers as it tried to spend its way out of a recession were examples of poor investments. "Government is a particularly poor judge of new technology" ....... . The millennials are here. Everything changes. The current generation of graduating college students won't remember a life offline. A deluge of unstructured data creates the next great information leaders. ("The dark matter of the enterprise is unstructured data" ........ Wireless broadband will be one of the only IT sectors to see increased funding this year and in the future......... Maintech, not Cleantech ....... Health care administration will be the fastest-growing sector. ......Consumption of digital goods on mobile devices is the growth story of the coming decade. ....... Electronic displays will prove the hottest investment in hardware this year and next. ..... The rumors of the demise of the reporter have been exaggerated.

David Gelernter: Manifesto

Is Google passe? I am not so sure. But Twitter and Wolfram Alpha have put some blood into the water. Suddenly Yahoo and Microsoft are energized on search like never before. The wisdom was Yahoo has lost the game. Now Yahoo is yelling, not so fast. Google has been challenged, that's for sure.

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
Search: Much Is Lacking

This had to happen sooner or later. Search is such a vast terrain. It will stay the number one challenge online. Content creation is not about to slow down. How do you keep up with the exponential explosion in content creation? You got to come up with new ways of doing search. There has always been a ton of room for innovation in search. But now we are seeing new energy in the domain.

Wolfram Apha Is Cool
Google Falling Behind Twitter?
Eminem: The Relapse: Twitter
What Does Your Resume Look Like Today?
Google Is Working On Search
Job Hunting And 2.0
Is Reading Socializing?
Reimagining The Office
Stream 2.0: The Next Big Thing?
Microfinance, Nanotech, Biotech, Software/Hardware/Connectivity
Define Social Media
The Stream, The Lifestream, The Mindstream
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing

Wolfram Apha Is Cool

I just used it for the first time myself right now, although I have been following it in the news for a while now. I am impressed. I am going to crown it niche king. Wolfram Apha does something that Google does not, just like Twitter does something that Google does not.

http://www73.wolframalpha.com

It is fun. It feels like you can play with it like it were a cool toy. It takes you straight to the answer. It does not give you links to sites you might want to explore to get to your answer. It is not preparing to preparing to prepare to give you the answer.

My first search term? New York. I love New York.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Google Is Working On Search

Image via CrunchBase

More Search Options And Other Updates From Our Searchology Event ordering results by time, by type (eg only reviews, only forum posts) .......... search will soon be synchronised between your desktop computer and your phone ....... showing you the relevant bits of reviews through 'sentiment analysis', and pulling out metadata (eg a star rating) thanks to support for RDFa and Microformats ........ a "related searches" system, but one that's displayed as an Ajax-driven spider diagram .........on-the-fly research spreadsheets. Type in "small dog" (their example) and it builds a table of breeds, pictures, vital statistics and other information automagically...... Google sees potential threats not from Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask ..... but from the likes of Twitter, which looks ready to pounce in real-time search, and from the yet-to-launch Wolfram Alpha, which is a very powerful data munger.
Searchologists Give A Glimpse Of What Google's Worried About
SearchEngineLand
Bits

It is good to see Google compete with itself. Search is so fundamental to the web that constant innovation is the only way to go. Windows can reach saturation, Office can, but not search. We are barely scratching the surface.

By now the way Google does search is so capital intensive. But real time search is not capital intensive, and there Twitter is the one with the buzz.

I don't think either Twitter or Wolfram Alpha will beat Google, but good thing both will keep Google on its toes. Because when it comes to search, much is lacking, much too much is lacking.

Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News

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