The Downside

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, guys - honestly, there just haven’t been a lot of interesting developments in the digital media area lately.  So, I’ll just tackle a few smaller topics today.

Pointless Twittering: According to a study by Pear Analytics, 40% of Tweets are “Pointless Babble” with another 38% being “Conversational” (which I suppose is a step above Pointless Babble.  A small step.)  Only 3.6% of posts were classified as news, confirming my assertion that Twitter is more of a communication tool than a source of information.  If you’re in the market for pointless babble or conversation, now you know where to go.  On a side note, I love the use of the term “pointless babble” in serious research.

Celeb name power: The social media press should stop talking about Hunch.com just because it was started by a Flickr founder.  It’s not interesting and it’s not (as the press keeps calling it) social Q&A; it’s social polling, more akin to  Sodahead or even the old-school Coolquiz than Yahoo! Answers or my baby.  With social Q&A you get to ask a question any way you want and let other people answer your question.  On Hunch, you can’t ask a question at all - you have to search for decision-making wizards that other users have already created.  And even then, it’s only good for making decisions like whether you should mow your lawn or whether you should renew your World of Warcraft subscription.  If you want to know why the sky is blue or what sights to see in Istanbul, you’re out of luck.  Yawn.  The initial burst of traffic they got from the press is fading, although not as precipitously as Wolfram Alpha’s.

Dumb, smart!: Radio Shack is smart to try rebranding as The Shack because they have nothing to lose.  Their old brand stands for irritable, aggressive salespeople, batteries, and out-of-date, no-name electronics devices, so they could stand to shed some of that.  Pizza Hut, on the other hand, is nuts to drop the ‘Pizza’ and call themselves The Hut.  They will forever be associated with Jabba, and there was nothing terribly wrong with their brand as it was.  The Hut says they changed the name to allow them to broaden their menu, but I say if Burger King can sell salads, you guys can sell just about anything short of sushi.  Don’t get me started on Syfy.

Microyawn: I suppose the whole Yahoo-Microsoft deal is big news, but for the average web user, it just won’t mean anything.  Yahoo search results will look different.  Big deal.

Wake me when Google Wave comes out.  It’s way too overblown to gain any mass-market acceptance, but at least it’ll be a fun toy for tech geeks like myself.

If you didn’t think Wolfram Alpha was useful before, here’s your proof that it can answer everday queries that everyone cares about:

• http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pi+to+20000+digits
• http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+moon+in+leagues
• http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=rimjob

Snicker.

Have you found any other amusing queries?

Update 4/29, 5:21pm: Wolfram updated his blog today and linked to his demo video, and the product does look as niche as I feared.  It is “smart answers” on steriods, and while it may complement regular search results nicely, it’s not moving the field of Internet search and indexing forward at all.  Perhaps it’s the press’s fault for pumping up Alpha as the next Google - clearly it is not, nor are they trying to be.  They’re tackling a relatively small problem (compared to indexing the entire Internet) and they appear to be targeting a small audience (academics and scientists), so we should probably stop discussing Alpha in the same breath as Google, Yahoo, and the rest.  Please move along, nothing to see here.

Much ado has been made lately about Wolfram Alpha, a new-fangled “search engine” due to release in May that promises to give answers to questions that are asked in plain English.  Predictably, it’s much ado about nothing.  Techcrunch responded today to leaked screenshots by sitting on both sides of the fence, saying it’s unlikely Wolfram has “something Google doesn’t or can’t build in a year,” while also saying that their own guest editor’s predictions of Wolfram’s search greatness are “persuasive.”  Which is it, guys?

Let me boil it down for you based on what I’ve read so far: Wolfram Alpha’s pitch is that their search engine is built to answer plain English “computational” questions, i.e. questions that have specific answers that can be calculated.  To do this, they are sucking in all the databases they can find - population stats, weather stats, census data, geographic data, and any other corpora that are readily available.  

Once they have all the data compiled, they make it mine-able using plain English queries.  In his TechCrunch guest article, Nova Spivack gives three sample queries that are supposed to show the awesome potential of Alpha:

• What country is Timbuktu in?
• How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?
• What is the average rainfall in Seattle?

It’s great that Alpha can answer these, but did Spivack bother to try these queries in Google?  Google gives an answer to every single one in the summary of the top result.  I didn’t even have to click through.  Hopefully these are just shoddy examples from Spivack rather than an example of how lame Alpha actually is.

Here are a few query types I’m hoping Alpha can answer that Google cannot:

• What was Bank of America’s stock price at close on September 11, 2001?
• Is next year a leap year?
• How have home prices in San Diego, CA changed in the last 5 years?

These are questions that have specific answers that can be calculated from readily available data, but (here’s the key) are unlikely to have been written about on the web in a way that would make them findable by Google.  These questions are so specific (long-tail), that Google just won’t have answers sitting around in its index.

I can hear your next question already: if Wolfram Alpha is only good for such long-tail questions, how can it possibly compete with Google?  The answer is: it can’t.  

For all the glowing talk, Alpha appears to be a large set of regular expressions that parse natural language so users can mine a massive database.  This is not dissimilar to how Ask.com worked in the late 90’s when they had a huge, human-built database of question templates allowing them to parse queries and provide links as answers.  Remember how well that worked?

Alpha must be an acquisition play.  They must be developing this answer engine with an eye towards selling it to one of the big players (Google, Yahoo, MS, or even Ask.com) so they can beef up their search results.  All of the majors already have smart answers features (a la Ask.com) that give exact answers to a small set of templatic questions, so acquiring Alpha would make an existing smart answers feature more robust.

TechCrunch reported that an Alpha “insider” today leaked the screenshow below in an attempt to show how Alpha is so much cooler than Google’s smart answers:

Wolfram Alpha Leaked Screenshot

On the left, we have Alpha’s result for a search on “ISS.”  The result it gives is a map and technical details of the Internation Space Station’s orbit.  Wow.  That is a truly horrible result.  Why anyone would leak this to show the power of the engine is beyond me.  Here’s what’s wrong with it:

• Who says I want information about the International Space Station?  Maybe I wanted Internet Security Systems or International Schools Services or info about the company ISS A/S out of Copenhagen.  How about a little disambiguation guys?  Clearly Alpha is not trying to be a comprehensive search engine. 
• Who wants data like that?  If I want info about the International Space Station, I would probably rather see its homepage than some crazy technical data about where it is right this second.
• What happened to the natural language queries, eh?  Showing that your engine can figure out what I meant by a search on “ISS” hardly shows any natural language parsing ability, and conversely shows the complete lack of disambiguation as I discussed above.
• Lastly a nitpicky Product Manager thing: at the top, it says that International Space Station is the “input interpretation” of ISS.  ”Input interpretation”?  Really?  How many users would have any idea what you’re trying to say there?  This is a product made by nerds for nerds.  I’m a nerd, so I can say this.

On the right, we see Google giving a fantastic answer to the query “maine population”.  (I’ll assume that someone changed the text in the query box to read “california population” after looking up Maine first.)  Google 1, Alpha 0.

Ultimately, Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, but rather a data mining language for answers about a relatively small set of known entities.  If you want to know about the International School Services, use Google.  If you want to know where Timbuktu is, use Google.  If you want to know the inclination and orbital period of the International Space Station, then by all means, go ahead and use Wolfram Alpha. (Note: Google gives a pretty good result when searching for “International Space Station Inclination.”)  When Alpha finally sells to one of the majors, it will mostly likely settle in as a feature of a search engine, not a search engine itself.

Caveat: all conclusions I’ve drawn are from the information available now.  We’ll see what it’s actually capable of when it launches in the coming weeks.