Watch When You Use WolframAlpha

In my previous post about WolframAlpha, I compared it with Google where I mentioned that it is a great resource for research analysts.

But having gone through the Terms Of Use of WolframAlpha, I would say use the content from WolframAlpha carefully.

Few snippets are below:

"The free Wolfram|Alpha service is available for ad hoc, personal, non-commercial use only." ...

"If you make results from Wolfram|Alpha available to anyone else, or incorporate those results into your own documents or presentations, you must include attribution indicating that the results and/or the presentation of the results came from Wolfram|Alpha. ..."

"Failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram|Alpha is not only a violation of these terms, but may also constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law. Attribution is something we expect you to give us in exchange for us having provided you with a high-quality free service."

"... if you are constructing a very large number of deep links, or any deep links that are created automatically in response to user input given on your site, you must take into account the restrictions enumerated in the section "Ways You May Use Our Free Service and Its Results." If you construct a website that induces others to use our service contrary to those terms, you are inducing them to violate our Terms of Use, and can be liable for those violations." ...

There are not many such hassles with Google.

So, whoever planning to start using WolframAlpha, do go through the Terms Of Use.

Bing Is Here

The first thing that came to my mind was "Chandler Bing" from Friends TV series but did not find Bing as funny. Neither did I find Bing that serious. Bing was launched recently.

My first impression after loading the home page was that there is something outdated about the page. I am not trying to criticize here, but when a search engine is named as a competitor of Google, it better live up to some minimum expectations. One example is when you search for "Google" on Bing, it give you two results. First one is the Google website and then a set of news on Google. Then it forces you to click another URL to see other results. This probably is not the right kind of user experience that I want.

One other observation is about how the image search compares against Google. I would just say that Google wins it hands down, because of the amount of relevant results that Google gives us. I searched for my name on Bing Image search and it gave me hardly 7 results, at the same time Google gave me 439 results of which atleast 50% were relevant images.

For exploring more on how Google and Bing performs against each other, I suggest checking out this webservice.

Till then have fun "Binging" as I go back to "Googling" ... Hope to see Bing match up to Google's level someday ...

WolframAlpha Vs Google

There is sudden buzz about WolframAlpha being a "Google killer" and I was quite surprised how that can happen when Google has been around for so long and it has vast amount of data already indexed.

Then, it turns out that WolframAlpha is a computational engine which targets at delivering the numbers in a meaningful format. 

I searched for "distance from New York to New Jersey" on WolframAlpha and it gave me the exact distance in miles (52.61 miles) and it also gave me results in meters, kilometers, nautical miles (??) and centimeters (??????). On top of it, it gave me direct travel time taken by flight, sound, light in a fibre and light in vacuum. Now most of the data that it returned are something that I do not care about. When I search the same on Google, I get links to distance calculators. 

After going through the examples, I could gather that, WolframAlpha in its current form is a great resource for research analysts who play with data. It is not that Google cannot provide this data, but WolframAlpha makes this data understandable and much more accessible 

Search for "India literacy" on Google and you will get 61% as the first result (without even digging the link) and this was present before WolframAlpha could do it with it computation engine based on Mathematica.

Is WolframAlpha a semantic search? I don't agree entirely. The structured queries as per their examples are fine, but here is why I am saying it is not entirely semantic.

I did see some weird responses as well. I searched for "voting age US" and it did not give me any result, whereas "voting US" gave me the result as "18 years of age; universal".

I searched for "US viting" and WolframAlpha interpreted it as "US Vitina" and showed me the distance from the US to Vitina in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Google prompted me and asked "Did you mean: US voting".

WolframAlpha has taken online computing to a different level, but not yet usable by common internet user who is used to Google. They are working on a lot of stuff right now and may soon come up with something far more robust, but will it challenge Google at any point? No I don't think so, just because the purpose of WolframAlpha is completely different from what Google is designed for. 

Again, Google Squared is in the news now and is being termed as "WolframAlpha killer'.

Note to Wolfram: ... I am not looking for distance from New York to New Jersey IN CENTIMETERS OR NAUTICAL MILES, and I am definitely not interested in how soon light will reach NJ from NY in vacuum. 

Google Android has come to life

Android enthusiasts can now check this ... It is impressive and works pretty well in US market with high speed data connectivity for cell phones. Just have to see, how and when they roll it out in Asian market and then how effective it will be.

See the snap shots here.

Google bids to lose

Google has lost the wireless spectrum bid to Verizon, but the reality is that they were never in the game to win.

Read this.

Interesting and it shows the way Google not just focuses on business, but how they want to change the lives of people.

Google Grows

Google is growing. Recent post in NYTIMES talk about how Google's share in search market grew.

The research firm Hitwise, which measures Web audiences, said that Google accounted for 58.3 percent of all searches in the United States in March of 2006. By November of 2006, Google’s share had grown to 61.8 percent, and by this November, to 65.1 percent. That’s more than triple the share of its nearest rival, Yahoo, and more than nine times that of third place finisher Microsoft.

Microsoft has been trying out and out to kill Google's growth. To an extent where they are paying corporates for using Live Search and trying to raise concerns over Google's acquisition of DoubleClick.

NewYork times article has also mentioned that:

“As long as Google’s competitors are aiming to be like Google or almost as good as Google, Google will continue gaining share,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “It has more resources and engineers focused on search. It is an arms race that they’ve won by a landslide.”

Competetion is going to grow, but with speculation about Google's intention to launch Androind powered phones in February can leave competetors way behind.

Year 2007 was about iPhone. Year 2008 will be about Android.

Updated: Here is an article at slashdot.org which portrays Google and OSS as big threats to Microsoft's survival. Linux is increasingly being used and market share is growing. Unless, Microsoft revisits it's pricing and "openness".

Google Phone <> iPhone

I have been reading articles comparing Google Phone with iPhone. Infact, they are comparing Android with iPhone and I feel it is unfair.

Android is an open source mobile platform and iPhone is Apple's product preloaded with the OS. When people are comparing iPhone's look and feel with Android, they are not thinking that it is the capabilities that you need to compare.



While I accept the fact that people who have been Apple users and who are interested in look and feel, iPhone will be really impressive. But Android is for people who love features.



iPhone does not allow users to write applications and deploy them whereas Android does. But Apple is planning to provide these capabilities by February '08. Like I mentioned in my previous post about GPhone, free texting, flash support, VOIP, video conferencing, photoshop your pictures, editing video on your phone, you name it. If you can dream it, developers can make it happen.

Android is evolving and is open source which means we can see hell lot of improvement in usability by developers who want to improve features and user experience unlike cases where developers are paid to develop features which they might not be interested in.

GPhone - A reality?

If you are one of those guys waiting for GPhone (Google Phone), you are in for a disappointment.

There is no GPhone.

Instead (even better !!) is Android™. Google had announced the release of Android™, a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications and it's open source.

As a part of the Open Handset Alliance, 30 mobile technology companies have come together to develop this complete, open and free mobile platform.

Here is a preview of Android™ platform:



Developers can create application on their own using this platform and it even has a Eclipse plugin available !!

Free texting, flash support, VOIP, video conferencing, photoshop your pictures, editing video on your phone, you name it. If you can dream it, developers can make it happen.

Read Google's official announcement here. Developers can jump in here

Android is not the first of it's kind. Funambol and Open Moko are others in the field. Open Moko has even released a developer preview version (.view here).

Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol has his own opinions about Android. I will be writing about it soon

Google's bid for Spectrum

Google is submitting its bid for 700Mhz spectrum along with other companies(Google to Join Spectrum Auction). With the spectrums being dominated by cell phone carriers this is a welcome change for the customers.
Its yet to be seen if google wins the auction conducted by FCC. If they win, we have to see if the services will be free or not and if its not free how they are going to price it. Check Don Reisinger's post Google will change this industry forever (CNET Blogs).

This, however is for US where people do not really rely completely on cell phones for information and there is an extensive reach of PCs. But in international market, the presence of mobile phones is far more prolific. South Asia and Asia Pacific region has tremendous number of cell phone users.
To see when Google or any other service provider will tap this market is, may be, not too far away.