What’s not to love about a good fight? Check out David Talbot’s “Wolfram Alpha and Google Face Off” in Technology Review. I don’t come away with a sense that I’ll regularly use either Wolfram Alpha or Google Public Data, but it’s nice to start seeing people off-road with them and compare the results. The Wolfram Alpha launch is supposed to be this month, so presumably we’ll all be able to do that in a matter of weeks, if not days. Google Public Data is available already, intergrated into web search.
Sadly, neither of these guys seems interest in providing a non-NLP interface. In my view, that would be far more useful. But I suppose it’s not what sells papers.
