大象传媒

Oh please! Not another paradigm. They're so '90s.

Seriously... it's all good and great if it works... but no one, and I mean no one has made it work. Where do they get their investors? No really.... I got a chili recipe and a burger restaurant concept more likely to succeed than taking on Google.... I'm just saying....

It's going to be interesting to see if Google is challenged. It will be good for the industry and all of us seeking out information to have an alternative. If nobody challenges Google successfully, we might see the search engine become the next 'evil-empire' in the footsteps of Microsoft.

it may help to change how you ask the question.

replace - "who is the president of france?" (searching for questions)

with

"the president of france is" (searching for answers)

helped me out with my problems finding the red bricks in lego bat man.

I am a strategist in an advertising agency and use search engines all the time for desk research. A great way to find a specific piece of information on a search engine is to make an "exact search" using the words you expect to form the answer. For example: "The capital of Australia is", or "BMW's market share is". You can also use wildcards (*) to fill in any gaps. For example: "the property market declined by * in 2008". This is also a good technique to find people with a particular lifestyle, attitude or experience. For example: "I wish my bank would" or "I read the Guardian because". Hope this helps.

In Google I typed: 'how far is sydney from new york', the first link gave me a page saying 9935 miles (15989 km).
You'd think Google maps would be able to produce an 'as the crow flies' distance between two points; but no, they gave 16,228聽miles - as if I could drive from the USA via Hawaii and Japan to Australia!

Google can convert [for example] kilos to pounds (or vice versa) if you prefix the question with the word 'convert': e.g. convert 10 kilograms to pounds - it usefully shows the answer above the first link. (10 kilograms = 22.0462262 pounds.)
You can also use this prefix to convert from/to imperial or metric systems for lengths (inches, ft, yds, miles etc), weights, volumes, etc. You can also convert from one currency to another; more than one country uses pounds and dollars so use 'GB pounds' and 'US dollars'.

There's a list of 101 Google search tips n tricks here:


But its not about knowing how to phrase a search question. Were still a long way from a semantic web, where information can be pulled together from various sources and presented in easy to understand form (though various niche websites are attempting this). As peoples expectations rise it may never exist in a truly satisfactory form. Still, competition means companies will keep on trying to reach it.

PS. Rene Coty was French President in 1957 (1954 1959).

For the time being, there's nothing "wrong" with Google. The most likely thing to bring it down is if its search results start being less than useful. For example, if their advertising-based business model goes a bit crazy so you suddenly get nothing but ads, or if they start removing search results to certain sites (for example, should they link to thepiratebay or not?). They also have copyright issues of their own to contend with, as some search results may point to copyrighted files.

It's an interesting experiment but not quite fair. Different search engines do different things. Google give you a list of links so the first result is important. But the other engines use a different approach,so Cuil's results have a sidebar that does a category search. What's the point if every new engine just tries to copy Google? Expecting Wolfram to ape Google would defeat the whole purpose.

Whilst this proves interesting to read, I need to call into question why we are looking for new search engines? We already have search engines such as dogpile.com which acts to collate all searches/information/pages from google, yahoo, ask and windows live search. This provides the best then of four worlds, and more importantly of repsected and regularly used search engines.Dogpile.com so everyone know sis a metasearch engine.I have witnessed a description of dogpile.com as the tesco of search engines. It can be said, however to be ironic how I came across this through a google search, no?

As for this new engine 'wolfram Alpha' appears to be a 'google' version of wikipedia.

SmartInsight,

Take a question like "Is the population of Sydney greater than the population of Birmingham UK?" No pure text-matching search engine could handle that type of question unless it can find articles containing the specific result, so even sites like dogpile can't get the answers in a single search.

That's why everyone (including the major search companies) is on the look-out for technology that can compute knowledge instead of blindly looking it up.

The design looks awful.

True Knowledge DOES answer the first four questions. It just expects them in the phrase of a real question instead of keywords. I just typed "What is the distance between Sydney and New York City" and "What is 10 pounds in kilgrams" and got the correct answers straight away.

Jed

This may be the beginning of a new kind of service.The term "Engine computing " may be more appropriate to describe this service rather than "computational knowledge engine ". we could look at cloud computing for an example.
Using the term computational knowledge engine could be confusing and may lead to misinterpretation of the service.

"helped me out with my problems finding the red bricks in lego bat man. "

Oddly enough, I typed in Red Bricks Lego Batman and the first link was gamefaqs.com, which gave a complete walkthrough, including red bricks.

I've noticed this before with Google - sometimes, two people in the UK typing in the same search get different results.

I wonder if it's tailored per region as well as domain area?

True Knowledge isn't designed to do web searching so queries like "GM Ford" and "sydney new york" which don't have a direct answer (other than a list of pages) are outside its scope.

It's designed to complement search by providing direct answers to questions with keyword searches (such as Google results) being producable instead when it doesn't understand or answer the question.

The phrase "i don't understand the question" surely should have given our author the clue, that TrueKnowledge was requiring a question

as for the red brick question - google's quieter sponsored links/results doesn't help with consistancy (and incidentally, makes it very difficult to prove that what you are paying for is what you get when attempting to ensure your link ends up at the top of the list) as it randomises the responses. whoever pays most will end up top more often, but not necessarily every time.

I found youtube was eventually the best source of info!

Personally I feel that there is definitely a need for an improvement on Google. On Twitter the other day, 2 of my friends tweeted about how they were unsatisfied they couldn't find what they wanted in the space of 2 hours of each other. To me that signifies a need for change.