The Googlization of Everything

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Better Search Doesn't Mean Beating Google By Saul Hansell

A headline that kicked around the blogosphere this weekend made no sense to me: "Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google."

The post -- written by Nova Spivack, the chief executive of Radar Networks -- took a look at a new sort of search engine being cooked up in secret by Stephen Wolfram, a British mathematician.

Wolfram's search engine, called Wolfram Alpha, is meant to be able to answer specific factual questions in a far more precise way than any search engine before it. For example, it will parse questions like "What is the location of Timbuktu?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?" to answer the questions rather than simply pull up sites that have the answer on them.

If it achieves its very ambitious goal, it could be quite useful and influential. (We won't begin to know until the site opens to the public in May.)

But Mr. Spivack's post has a critical logical flaw, one that too many people make: Google is a company, while Wolfram Alpha is a technology. They are very different. And it is Google's success with users and advertisers that made it "important."

First of all, companies constantly change their technologies. What would it mean if your operating system had a better file system or interface than Windows? Not much. Over 20 years, Microsoft has constantly evolved the technologies it uses to build its operating system products. If you are going to build a new one, you need to compete with what your rival will do in the future, not what they do now.

Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that the search engine used on Google today mainly uses PageRank, the algorithm that was the center of Google's first product. Google doesn't boast about it, but it already uses much of the latest trendy idea in search -- "semantic" formulas that try to understand what the words in a query mean. For example, it not only takes into account that "Britney Spears" is a name, not two random words, but the name of a famous person. It will search for Britney pages differently than a search for a name of someone who is not so well known. ...