By SAUL HANSELL, The New York Times
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 it does 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 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 it will for a name of someone who is not so well known.
Mr. Spivack appears to assume that Google is sticking to its initial methodology and interface of simply presenting links to existing Web pages. He writes that “Google’s index is also incomplete, and always will be. Therefore Google does and always will contain gaps.”
For years, Google has blended hundreds of different algorithms and search methodologies to make a product it hopes will attract users. It already provides direct answers to some simple questions, like currency conversions. And it invites users to contribute information that is not already in its index, as in Knol and YouTube. Google may fail, but not as Mr. Spivack seems to imply, because it mindlessly sticks to one approach.
More important, successful companies succeed for many reasons in addition to the quality of their products. When a technology start-up begins to do well, it is like a snowball rolling downhill, as technology, packaging, marketing, sales, customers, developers, brand reputation and a lot of luck bind together to create momentum that then feeds on itself.
Back to Microsoft: There are lots of people who believe that there are better operating systems available today than Windows. The question is, how very much better do they have to be, and what else needs to happen, to unwind the self-reinforcing ecosystem that lets Microsoft dominate the PC business? Windows now is just one of Microsoft’s products.
Mr. Spivack wrote about Google, not simply Google’s search product. But even if that’s what he meant, you can’t really separate the product from the business. The company’s importance stems from the breadth and depth of its offerings, such as e-mail, maps, cloud computing and most important, advertising. The search engine itself draws money, technology, employees, attention and support from the Webmaster community in part because of Google’s momentum in all its other activities.
In addition, the factual queries that Wolfram Alpha is geared to answer aren’t the queries that make billions of dollars for Google. Google’s money comes from commercial questions like “Mother’s Day roses” and “Thai restaurants Philadelphia” that bring in the advertising dollars, some of which are used to improve results on all sorts of queries.
Wolfram Alpha may well have an idea about how to make money. It may not matter even if it doesn’t. Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know how their nice little pellet of technology would roll downhill picking up one of the best business models and most powerful brands the world has ever seen.
I don’t want to be too hard on Mr. Spivack, who has done a great job breaking the news of what could well be a very interesting technology. But I think he, and so many others who write about technology, would be better off being clear that technologies are simply some of the raw material from which important companies are made.
