How Important Is WolframAlpha?
David Weinberger,
Joho the Blog,
May 05, 2009
I remember when Google launched. It was very quiet. They had a hand-drawn logo. It was small, simple, and it really worked. In other words, the Google launch was exactly the opposite of what we are seeing from Wolfram Alpha. Based on the prelaunch alone (because I still haven't seen any actual working technology) I don't hold out high hopes. Dave Weinberger says, "Curation is a source of its strength. It increases the reliability of the information, it enables the computations, and it lets the results pages present interesting and relevant information far beyond the simple factual answer." Well maybe. But from where I sit, curation is its fatal weakness, the thing that means it can't adapt quickly to the environment and will always entail a high overhead.
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