There’s a lot of buzz swirling about Wolfram Alpha, the new computational search engine — perhaps too much. But regardless, people want to see the service in action to decide for themselves. And some of those people tuned into the preview webcast put on by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society yesterday. Unfortunately, if you listened in live, it was audio-only. But Harvard followed up by posting a video of the event to YouTube later in the day — a video without a single shot of the service!
So if you’re interested in watching 1 hour and 45 minutes of footage of creator Stephen Wolfram walking you through something just off screen that you can’t see, we’ve embedded it below for your viewing “pleasure.” But hey, the video is available in HD and at least the camera turns off of Wolfram for the Q&A session, to liven up the action a bit. Still, if you’re really interested in learning about the service, you may want to listen in.
The rest of you may be more interested in the hands on report ReadWriteWeb did recently. Or maybe you’ll enjoy the leaked screenshot of the service — at least that’s something. Unfortunately, we can’t all be Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who got a personal demo of the service recently. Wolfram Alpha is set to launch in a few weeks.
jesus.. put up or shut up.. getting tired of exclusive previews here and there.. and drumming up everything like its the next greatest thing after mother theresa…
sounds to me like the sasquatch story.. lots of talking.. and talking and press and conferences….
And the more this is going on the more I am calling BS on this entire thing….
Put up or shut up… pretty simple.
i wholeheartedly disagree. this isn’t a bunch of stupid mba tools drumming up support for vaporware. wolfram’s smart, understands mathematical complexity, and even if the engine doesn’t work in its first incarnation, it will with time.
Have you ever used mathematica? If not, you should put up or shut up. What software have you developed that is used by the smartest mathematicians and physicists in the world today.
Sounds like Cuil, how did that turn out?
And what does Cuil do? Please enlighten us Sandra. Tell what you know about Cuil? Tell us what you know about WolframAlpha? Your idiotic unsubstantiated bold assertion is not an argument. It is a piss take.
This just told me you have a minus ten idea about all this. Comparing Cuil to Wolfram .. 2012 is near.
This is a man of incredible genius–I’d think that this man’s established record of creativity (like, say that of Apple’s) very much warrants the buzz he’s receiving, even if he’s relatively unknown in the tech world.
Agreed
Wolfram needs to stop being an attention whore. Google will always be number one with regards to search, and video, and online ads, and just about everything else. http://iamned.com/blog/ stop complaining about recession.
spam
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this is lame bs by him and i agree put up or shut up. stop the teasing.
“There’s a lot of buzz swirling about Wolfram Alpha, the new computational search engine — perhaps too much”
“Too Much”???
Oh really? So the guys at TwitCrunch can identify “too much” buzz when they see one. How ironic.
If you’ll stop being a jackass for a second, you’ll notice that I linked that to another site that was questioning the buzz of Wolfram Alpha.
aah. how brilliant linking to another site to avoid having to stand by your statements.
perhaps you could link to other sites who think twitter is a load of bs when you write about them?
Yeah, I’ll get right on that.
I would recommend that you guys google Wolfram or read his wiki page so that you get a sense for who he is and what he is capable of. To dismiss him off hand because you cant get a demo is insane.
And while I am at it I think that the the bloggers at TC are doing a pathetic job. Last article on this story called this a ’snorefest’ and who could stay up blah blah.
Yet you find yourself to be intellectually engaged when you write the thousandth article on twitter??? wtf?
Thats just pathetic and you should be ashamed.
In a few months all of this will be forgotten. Remember the Wikipedia search engine in 2007? That failed, too. And yes these stories do tend to be try and dull, but somehow people keep coming back here.
Technotopia, do you understand the difference between a search engine and a knowledge engine? If you do, then enlighten the readers here of why you think it is a hype, otherwise I would just shut up simply because I have no clue at all to the differences between the 2.
Shopped!
This will fail.
Seems like a case of shoddy journalism with sour grapes here at TC.
That’s the risk people take by overwhelmingly supporting one blog enterprise over others.
Sorry but this is a sorry state of affairs.
? What I’m annoyed about is what many of you are annoyed about — that you can’t see the actual damn demo in the demo video! Nothing more, nothing less.
Instead of making a minor comment on the presentation and our inability to view the demo, why dont you watch the thing? Understand it? Parse it and then write about it like a good ‘journalist?’
Come on MG dude, you can do it. Tell us whats Wolfram’s big idea! (he is an honest-to-God genius, he has no need to bs)
The point is that if I complain about lack of demo at my blog than it doesn’t hurt anyone because nobody is visiting my blog. But when you do it, it becomes an event of bringing people and companies down through loud mouthpiece. So where’s the professional responsibility and ethics here?
May be not everyone is annoyed.
Its funny how he’s in touch with our pulse that we are are annoyed about the same thing.
But when we complain that Twitter is over represented he losses touch.
Wolfram Alpha does not compete with Google, according to the guys at the ReadWriteWeb.
product demo we’ll never get to see in action? another powerset? “Natural language Location” is the only discovery technology us english speaking humans will ever need.
what happened to keeping it simple?
NaturalLocator.com – rolodex the net
“Natural language Location”?
Locator guy: the more you post, the less likely I am to ever visit any of your shoddy properties…and the more likely I am to tell 10 friends how horrible anything you touch ends up
Meet nolocator.com, ok? Your one stop shop for knocking the snocolate out of Mr. Locator man, and shut up his stupid face, ok? Such is the word of Sanjay.
MG is a rubbish journalist, and in other news …
there are infinite ways of presenting search results and doing the search itself, google uses just one. the funny part is that there is no different methodology when searching with google, just one size fits all.
Look! You can see the reflection in his glasses!
I’d hit him.
It sounds cuil.
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I like it – why always start speaking about overhyping – this comes from all your misinterpreting and dumb assumptions – why not wait and see before starting a bad buzz after a positive buzz!
FREAKS!
Test
It seems odd that a slight criticism re: lack of screenshots, leads to you having a seemingly negative attitude to something that, at the very least, will have credible applications if released as described.
Complacent, agenda-driven journalism. With this and the new MySpace CEO stuff the shine is coming off the TC halo
Techcrunch backs Twitter. That’s pretty telling. It’s about the level it relates to. What I want is a tech blog that relates to Wolfram. Any ideas?
Although there are no screen shots (no shit, Sherlock), it is clear that Wolfram Alpha is a major breakthrough! And yes, Google should be worried. Wolfram Alpha is this:
Something that comes BEFORE search.
What I mean is simply that Wolfram Alpha could generate massive amounts of web pages from its output, and then Google goes to work on those.
Of course, those web pages, and thus the search, is not necessary. It is all contained in WA. There may be a need for sharing “the right questions”.
I can’t believe that TechCrunch can’t see that they have missed the point, majorly! It is really a sad, and defining day for them..
I see hordes of people writing/saying things like “according to Wolfram Alpha, the (insert topic) is (insert fact)”. If I am right, and I think I am, then WA is massively disruptive.
Hey I could even generate my own blog by just aksing smart questions! Bye, bye, TechCruch…
Posting anonymously for personal reasons.
I’ve seen Wolfram Alpha live. It is not a Google killer, and it is getting overhyped. That said, it does still work quite well – the data visualization is splendid, and some of the calculations and mutations it can perform on the data are impressive.
There are two main problems with Alpha as it stands: a) Their coverage is low. It doesn’t take very long to find a query that returns nothing. Based on their description, they also don’t have a way to scale up very well. b) Their query parsing is pretty rigid. You’ll find that you have to rephrase a query to get results – so “New York temperature” will get you a result but “weather in the big apple” won’t yield anything.
All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind; any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms. ,