Tag Archives: Wolfram Alpha


Searching Questions: how good is Google?

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… that “the knowledge web” will eventually get taken over by smaller specialist engines like Wolfram Alpha.

It’s a depressing vision. But what if Google could combine the trustworthiness of friend groups with the depth of crowdsourced expert knowledge?

Crowdsourced Q&A services Quora and Stack Overflow already tap into a community of experts who provide reliable answers to user questions. Answers are voted up or down by the community. On Stack Overflow, experts can also …

Tags: crowd crowdfunding crowdsourcing crowdsourcing platform distributed work google Larry Page Searching Sergey Brin Siva Vaidhyanathan Stack Overflow Web search engine Wolfram Alpha

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Watching Big Brother

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Ville Miettinen

… than a massive undertaking.

But a crowd is not always necessary. New systems, such as Wolfram Alpha, allow even individual citizens to scrutinize large amounts of data in a meaningful way. Rather than searching data like Google, Wolfram Alpha computes it, applying code from Mathematica to its own vast library of curated data (which makes it more like Wikipedia than Google, in a way ). In theory, at least, this will make it much easier to analyze huge data sets, such as COINS. …

Tags: Barack Obama COINS crowdsourcing government data Julian Assange Public.Resource.Org Wikileaks Wolfram Alpha

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