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Perennial Searcher

April 27, 2009

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha launches in May, and it will be greeted with much anticipation, excitement, and curiosity. Will this tool be a “game changer” or “Google Killer” as some are predicting? WA is more of an “answers engine” than it is a bread-and-butter search engine. In WA’s own words, it is a “computational knowledge engine”. Whereas Google returns a list of documents that may contain an answer, WA actually computes and generates a meaningful, accurate answer. The follks over @ ReadWriteWeb were able to attend 60-minute demo of WA, and here are their notes. Expect to hear more about Wolfram Alpha in the coming days and weeks . . . especially since Harvard University will host a webcast about it tomorrow afternoon @ 3 p.m. EST. Web users can post questions during the event as well as @replying or Direct Messaging The Berkman Center on Twitter.

posted by Brian at 10:16 am | Comments (0)

April 20, 2009

The Rise of Twitter and the Twitterverse

Twitter is out of the gates and running. Its popularity has been gaining momentum (thanks in part to celebrities such as Oprah and Ashton Kutcher). Don’t believe me? Check out these Google News results.  Twitter – - to the uninitiated – - is a microblogging service that allows for 140-character posts or entries. These posts are supposed to be in response the this simple question:  ”What are you doing?”.  Facebook users will liken Twitter to Facebook’s “status updates” (and may even ask, why bother with “tweeting”?).  Individuals and organizations have eagerly added Twitter to their “social media marketing campaigns”. Searchers, too, will want to pay attention to Twitter. It’s a goldmine of data, content, trends, links, etc. They can actually scrape the Twitterverse with Twitter’s offical search tool. A near “real-time” search engine? Searchers will also want to pay attention to another Twitter-related trend: #hashtags.  As you could probably deduce, #hashtags are “tags” (i.e., keywords, descriptors, unoffical subject headings) that are used to label items and posts. In short, it’s possible to search Twitter by #hashtags. For more information, check out the #hashtags website.  Common Craft, by the way, provides an excellent overview of Twitter in this educational video clip:

posted by Brian at 4:43 pm | Comments (0)