SEJ is obviously a site devoted to information on and related to search engines. There are no claims here that this site is for anything else.

WA specifically states in their FAQ:

Who is Wolfram|Alpha for?

Everyone! Its goal is to bring expert-level knowledge to everybody.

Their home page specifically states:
enter any town (e.g. a home town)

I did exactly what they say their site is designed to do.

Some of the data that came back was inaccurate at best. Other data was completely wrong.

Google Squared invites us to “enter a topic”. I entered “Jimmy Carter”. Because to me, the man and his life, IS a topic. Anyone who thinks a major international political figure is not a topic should travel the world and visit countless institutions of higher learning where entire courses of curriculum are written on and teach about such individuals. Countless books are written about them because they are a topic unto themselves.

The fact that G2 choked just showed that their system is no better than WA.

But lets pretend for a minute that I really wasn’t being fair. That my concept of a topic is actually more of a niche focus and that Google Squared really isn’t capable of providing valuable information on truly niche topics.

Click on the G2 home page link “Roller Coasters”. What comes back? Statistics that are kind of generic, and with no capacity to sort the data.

So let’s say I want to find a grid with the FASTEST roller coasters. I tried that. What did I get back? instead of a “speed” column like their own default version has, I got a “capacity” column. Uh, I didn’t type “capacity” so what brainiac at Google Labs decided to take a word typed directly into their search box and toss out that word in favor of some other information?

I agree that Google is not the answer to everyone’s needs. Yet making obviously flawed alternatives available is not helping address that issue.

And from another angle, if the argument really is that it should be up to visitors to decide, then my article does just that – offers my opinion on the user experience and casts a resounding “FAIL” vote. So do many of the comments here, and other blog articles about the same subject.

If there were a boat-load of comments in response to my article that showed how Cuill, WA and G2 really do provide better data than plain vanilla Google, your claim might have more weight. And in that case, I’d be happy to write my next article about Britney.

Instead, the dissenting opinion in response to my article is that regardless of the quality of the experience, I should back off from stating facts based on my personal view. Sounds like you came up with your argument by using information from one of those niche engines.

And if your blog designed for a niche market segment, please say so on your home page in big bold letters (dare we ask for the a “blink” tag here? that you don’t have anything about Paris Hilton, and stop confusing mass market.

I hope you get it. Just like people go for small blogs like yours for niche and variety, instead of just hanging out at Washington Post and New york Times, people do need to have variety and niche in their searches. Plain old Google search is only as interesting as plain out New york Times, irrespective of how good their reputations are. And nobody needs to advertise in bold letters what they don’t have. It is upto the readers to decide. And those users have voted Wolfram with 100m+ searches.

I don’t disagree with the fact that WA is pretty lousy at the moment for a lot of queries, but just plain old comparisons with big G won’t cut it. World is too big for one search engine, just like it is too big for just one data source.

Many (most) people don’t check multiple sources or engines so a single source can become their cast in concrete perception. Based both on what they find and on what they don’t find (as in Jimmy Carter example).

Good stuff. Thanks for the insights.

And if you are a search engine designed for a niche market segment, please say so on your home page in big bold letters (dare we ask for the a “blink” tag here? and stop confusing the mass market.

You know completely well that once you announce anything that even smells like it’s a search engine, no matter how specialized your offer is, as soon as the media catches it, it’s going to snowball into “New search engine” and all the tech geeky details about why it’s only for a small segment of the world are going to be lost.

K thnks bye

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=988407

I would also say that not all search engines are aimed at you. WA is aimed at researchers, academics, people like that. For those needs it’s quite useful, but it has problems and incomplete data because it is in “Alpha” and because it is a usage-based model.

Cuil was a disaster.

Squared is ok, but I’m not really seeing the value right now. It’s an experiment for me, having a play with a new layout and new idea. I’m not using it. Actually I use Duck Duck Go to collect stuff quickly if I’m writing a post or something.

http://duckduckgo.com/

I’ll have to agree that there are other analogies you could used instead of the baby-crack one. Not smooth!

I find g^2 to be nice for searches like those you can see below the search box.
Other than that – it is a crack baby :)

Yes, as mentioned in a previous reply comment (June 8/4:00PM) , I did go to the Help link. I really do my best to put in the footwork before ranting about a subject.

At the same time though, the help page does NOT compensate for the extremely poor quality of the user experience (as described in that reply comment).

What this really boils down to is the fact that Google Squared is a Google product, Google is a corporation that cares about dominating the market.

For all the gratitude I have that they came up with such an overall outstanding primary product, it does NOT discount their complete utter disregard for causing annoyance, confusion and frustration to millions of people who use any number of their other products.

If a product doesn’t even have BASIC QA testing of the results from a wide swath of potential users before it’s released out into the public, and if that product is coming from a company as big and dominant as Google, well that’s just sad. And reflects Big Corporate culture.

Cuil and Wolfram Alpha at least have the excuse that they’re wanna-be companies. So the fact that their products appear to have been engineered by crack addicts tempers their lack of quality.