Being a OS X user, I didn’t get to test Google Chrome until now. Although, as I have read about it in tutorials and seen on You Tube, I could conclude that Google Chrome is a useless application, it doesn’t bring anything new, it does not create and does not satisfy any need, it doesn’t offer something new to the user. I guess I could say that this product was not made for the user.
Today a found a pre-Beta version and I decided to test it. The default Browser I use is Safari and occasionally FireFox and Opera. I have to admit that Chrome is faster than Safari (Version 3.2.3) but that’s not enough for me. Maybe in the final version things will be different, but after reading about the Windows version, I don’t think it will be able to give me what I need.
The war of the answer engines, searchology, Google Squared vs. Wolfram|Alpha.
What is Google Squared?
“Google Squared is launching later this month in labs. Google Squared returns search results in a spreadsheet format. It structures the unstructured data on web pages. So a search for Small Dogs returns results with names, description, size, weight, origin, etc., in columns and rows.
Google is looking for data structures on the web that imply facts, and then grabbing it for Squared results. “It takes an incredible amount of compute power to create one of those squares,…”
The next “Google killer”, Wolfram|Alpha service from the creator of Mathematica & the New Kind of Science, Stephan Wolfram, will be launched in next days. According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information.
Instead of searching the web for info, Alpha is built around a vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources. Alpha then organizes and computes this knowledge with the help of sophisticated Natural Language Processing algorithms. According to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).
Alpha will come in a free version, but there will also be a paid version, which will allow users to download and upload data to Alpha. Stephen Wolfram did not go into too much detail, including pricing, but pro users will, for example, be able to not just see a graph, but also download the data behind this graph for use on their own machines or in Mathematica.
The tool will kill Google? No, not at all,maybe it is actually wrong to call it a search engine at all (and Wolfram prefers to call it a “computational knowledge engine“). If you wanted to know what sights to see on your next trip to Moscow, for example, Alpha, from what we’ve seen so for, will not be able to help you.
Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.
In an impoverished Germany by the war, with a Versailles convention which imposed very tough conditions as war damage and with a severe economic crisis, it was not a hard thing for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - NSDAP) to acquire the power. Hitler best intuited the power of propaganda and fully exploited the technology and means of communications available in those times. By taking control of the main means of communication, throughout his totalitarian regime, the German people lived in a reality distortion field.
Time past by, the technology evolved, people don’t and also forgot. In the year 2008, means of information have diversified, information travels fast and owning real information became the most important weapon. The whole world is involved in a very expensive war against a more or less invisible enemy: terrorism. USA assumed the role of the leading warrior against this enemy, by any means. At the same time, a new economic crisis hits the entire world and mainly USA. The situation is similar with the 30’s and this time the Internet is the main mean of communication.
