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Saturday, June 6, 2009

Google´s Answer To Wolfram Alpha

It did not take them long, but Google now have a rival for Wolfram Alpha in the lab. Google Squared now collaborates key data from the various results of a single search query into tabular form to compare and contrast results. It looks like it is simply selecting paragraphs that match the query plus some predefined or heuristically obtained key data like locations or categories and presenting them in a table. I am not sure exactly how much intelligence is going on in the background here. To be honest at first glance it looks like only the method of presentation has been changed, using keywords to display data from pages and present it in a table rather than just the links to the pages. I could not see any natural language processing going on here, which Wolfram is supposed to support or any real calculation or summary. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, Google´s approach might be better, because the sources of information are visible, leaving it to the user to ultimately make the choice of accuary and correctness.

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