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You are here: News > News > Wolfram Alpha Debuts with Glitches and Jeers
| » IT Security NEWS |
| » 16 May 2009 |
| Wolfram Alpha Debuts with Glitches and Jeers |
| Sometime in the future—if ever Wolfgram Alpha's "computational" approach catches on—we'll be getting search results ranked by organized depth instead of links to bits and pieces of the worldwide web that may or may not be related to the search query. Such new processes in seeking and categorizing online knowledge will potentially make the information superhighway a lot more accessible to the layman than ever before. Wolfgram could help pave the way for another search engine revolution, provided that it can finally get launched with no further problems or drawbacks. It had no such luck last Friday evening, though. The newcomer search engine that's supposed to revolutionize the industry in ways Google had before it was released to the public under difficult conditions, which forced the company to scale back expectations for its operations this weekend. As good as Post-Google Internet is at searching for relevant information to simple searches, it's quite terrible at providing surfers single answers to their queries. Granted, Google knows how to get you the answer you're looking for, but it's not very good at selecting the correct answer. It instead gives you a massive inundation of semi-related and outright unrelated data, links, doubts, and even more questions. It's up to you to look up who Michael Jackson's pet monkey Bubbles is or what the GDP of Haiti is. In contrast, Wolfgram Alpha works by not only providing you the GDP of Haiti, but also its unemployment rate and other appropriate data connected to your research. Or, using the Bubbles example, you'll get Michael Jackson facts and trivia galore at your disposal by making that query. However, as already mentioned, the new search engine was unfortunate enough to make its debut in the middle of a literal storm—that is, a tornado watch had the company's engineers in Champaign, Illinois on edge as they tried to bring the service online. But Murphy's Laws dictated that database and networking glitches should emerge in order to prevent the search engine from launching as of 6:00 PM PDT, which is an hour later after the organization promised it would go live globally. To make matters worse, uplink trouble with Justin.tv prevented Wolfram from explaining to its expectant audience exactly what was happening for nearly thirty minutes while commentators in the chat room ruthlessly heckled the corporation with the age-old Internet slang jeer of "Epic Fail". Wolfram Research was ultimately forced to compromise in order to salvage the public relations disaster that they've just faced, lowering their initial expectations of a Friday launch to a promised test launch over the weekend with full service expected by Monday. |
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