Wolfram Alpha takes search engines to a whole new level

So as you can see from the screen capture on the right, I couldn't resist having a little fun with it. But all joviality aside, Wolfram Alpha might be the hugest leap forward in search engine technology since Google debuted more than ten years ago.

Calling itself a "computational knowledge engine", Wolfram Alpha takes your query and then instead of trying to match it up with a best result, it computes an answer from a vast base of structured data. Ask it "2+2" and it will give you 4. Punch in some quadratic equations or other advanced math and Wolfram Alpha will spit out a bunch of graphs for it. Tell Wolfram Alpha "Greensboro, North Carolina" and it will give you a map of the town's location, the population, average elevation from sea level and some other relevant data. Ask for the weather in a certain place on the day that you were born and Wolfram Alpha will tell you that too. And those are just for openers: you wouldn't believe what Wolfram Alpha can do with a string of notations for nucleic acids and how it'll find 'em in the human genome, among other things.

Wolfram Alpha is open for public "testing" this weekend, before it officially launches tomorrow. Give it a whirl! This is definitely the future of Internet searching.

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Cuil: The ISHTAR of search engines!

You might have heard about Cuil: a new search engine, the founders of which have stated is going to be a "Google killer". It went online a couple days ago and I've tried it a number of times since then, growing more frustrated with each attempt to determine how exactly Cuil is supposed to be useful. It claims to have indexed more pages than Google. And maybe it has, and all those pages really are sitting in a database somewhere in Cuil's corporate headquarters. But if so, the algorithms needed to access 'em are shot to Hell. Doing a search for myself in regard to the Viacom mess last year turned up photographs of a robot and an NBA basketball player. And the results don't even seem consistent from one search to the next, either...

This thing cost upwards of $33 million to start up. Kinda makes Cuil the Ishtar of search engines, when you think about it.

Cade Metz at The Register has written an enlightening - and hilarious - essay about what seems to have gone wrong with Cuil. It reads frighteningly close to what happened at ION Storm (John Romero's now-defunct game company that promised to "make you his bitch"), given the ratio of wild promises to burn rate of venture capital.

Whatever is going on over there, Cuil's owners need to fix things fast, or else their little project will be a vague memory by Christmas.

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Interview with Jesse Brown on CBC Radio One's SEARCH ENGINE about the Viacom/YouTube mess

Search Engine hosted by Jesse Brown is a show on CBC Radio One ("CBC" being the Canadian Broadcasting Company). It's about issues pertaining to the Internet and it's heard by our good friends all across the Great White North. Last week Jesse phoned all the way down here to Reidsville, North Carolina and interviewed me about my recent situation with Viacom and the supposed "copyright infringement" on YouTube involving my first school board commercial. The segment is running on this week's installment of Search Engine and you can listen to it as an MP3 podcast here.

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