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DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

#41

Post by JoelMcCracken »

sinaiman wrote: post #38

Great news, my suggestion: ditch the "time calculated" info on Wolfram results. I personally don't care that something was "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Mon Apr 18 2011 19:31:47 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)" Just "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha" would suffice

I care, if its old. The knowing the age of data is very valuable when judging its relevance.

Re: DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

#42

Post by rbonvall »

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #41
sinaiman wrote: post #38

Great news, my suggestion: ditch the "time calculated" info on Wolfram results. I personally don't care that something was "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Mon Apr 18 2011 19:31:47 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)" Just "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha" would suffice

I care, if its old. The knowing the age of data is very valuable when judging its relevance.

Then, "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha two minutes ago" would suffice.

Re: DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

#43

Post by frossie »

katovatzschyn wrote: post #31

Is there a name for the Duck Duck Go duck? If not, I find "Newton" would be rather apt.

Is there a need to name him/her? I find myself saying "I'll ask The Duck" as the equivalent of "I'll google it". I don't feel I need to get more personal than that :-)

Re: DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

#46

Post by shasta »

sinaiman wrote: post #38

Great news, my suggestion: ditch the "time calculated" info on Wolfram results. I personally don't care that something was "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Mon Apr 18 2011 19:31:47 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)" Just "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha" would suffice

It's important so that you can know exactly when it goes into the public domain

Re: DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

#47

Post by MikeCapone »

hugh3 wrote: post #20
jayzee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major corporation with an arrogant CEO who received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20,joined the faculty there, and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21 . Lets cut him some slack for being awesome. -- from wikipedia

He is, nonetheless, considered insufferably arrogant even by the standards of other geniuses (and CEOs). Does any of this matter for his products? Naah. Mathematica and Alpha are good, and as for A New Kind Of Science... well, I doubt I'll ever bother to read enough of it to find out.

Have you ever talked to him?

Re: DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

#48

Post by redthrowaway »

shasta wrote: post #46
sinaiman wrote: post #38

Great news, my suggestion: ditch the "time calculated" info on Wolfram results. I personally don't care that something was "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Mon Apr 18 2011 19:31:47 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)" Just "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha" would suffice

It's important so that you can know exactly when it goes into the public domain

Interesting, I hadn't considered that angle. Are all W|A results public domain?

Re: DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

#49

Post by burgerbrain »

redthrowaway wrote: post #48
shasta wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important so that you can know exactly when it goes into the public domain

Interesting, I hadn't considered that angle. Are all W|A results public domain?

I believe he means "so you know when it falls out of copyright".

Re: DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha are now official partners

#50

Post by nosignal »

This is potentially really good news. I've always loved the concept of W|A but hated the implementation. While very good at answering specific queries, it's no good at incidental or exploratory knowledge discovery - it's kind of out of the way, a little on the slow side, but most importantly it doesn't link externally (or even internally). I get the vibe that the W|A crew have an excellent idea and are doing an excellent job, but don't really "get it" when it comes to everyday usability. As they admit in their subtitle, they've built an engine, not a whole machine.

On the other hand, usability is DDG's killer app as far as I'm concerned. The focus on ease of interpretation as well as interaction is really valuable.

Simply having W|A's answer on the same page as a bunch of direct links to alternative sources is valuable enough.

But if I get a bit excited, if the power of the vast knowledge & computational ability of W|A finds its human voice through DDG, it could start to bridge the gap between "search" and actual knowledge retrieval. It's one (good) thing to remove 1 click by showing a number relating to a simple query - it's another thing to remove 50 clicks and 45 minutes of research and assessment to establish the answer to a one-step-above-simple query.

What I'd love to see as a start is for W|A to provide facts & figures against results returned through DDG. Eg. Search the web for "most popular travel destinations in europe", and be able to summon demographics, exchange rates, even trip prices for each result.

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