First WolframAlpha, which tells me that this Saturday is 157th day of 2009, arrives and now we have Google Squared, which tells me that the most important operating system is Linux, which is the same as Ubuntu. They both are headed towards the same goal, but in different directions. Google^2’s result is more useful (and wrong), while Wolfram’s result is actually correct, though useless to 99% of us. How, then, are they heading for the same goal?

Both services fundamentally aim to organize and structure the current information chaos. WolframAlpha works on facts, ignoring anything that it cannot mathematically calculate or analyze. If you ask it something and it answers, you can be pretty sure it’s right, but it can’t answer most of your questions right now. Google^2, on the other hand, will happily answer just about anything you ask (ask being used figuratively, since neither service takes questions), it just might not be correct or relevant.

ReadWriteWeb mentions in an article about Google^2  that the descriptions of each item would be more useful if they just quoted from Wikipedia, but that’s not what Google^2 is for. WolframAlpha might pull a specific piece of information from a specific source, but Google^2 is just looking for any match to the relevant topic, not a verified one.

In their current forms, both services have only limited uses. Wolfram is an excellent calculator and source of statistics/trivia. Google^2 is a good starting point if you know knothing about a topic. Eventually, though, both services should become a full-featured, accurate, non-picky engine to extract structured information from chaos. The question is: who gets there first?

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