Searching for a new engine
By Charles Miller

The latest buzz on the internet is the sneak preview of the most recent invention that could change the internet forever. In technical circles, great anticipation has surrounded an ambitious project to create a comprehensive “computational knowledge engine.” This is supposed to be the next step above a “search engine” such as Google, and will make use of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. NLP significantly overlaps the fields of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

The most recent innovation is the Wolfram Alpha “knowledge engine,” which has been much discussed but unseen by the general public until this month. This new innovation is supposed to be the one that moves us all closer to the “Holy Grail” of the internet—a program that actually understands questions and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does. In other words, it’s a computer program that not only understands the question you asked, but what you meant to ask.

Computer experts believe the new search technology incorporated in Wolfram Alpha might be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet, as important as was Google. The real innovation, according to its inventor Dr. Stephen Wolfram, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly.” If you ask the engine the population of San Miguel, it will tell you; but if you ask it the population of San Miguel in the year the domestic production of potatoes in Ireland exceeded the value of silk exports from Japan, it will cross-check all the relevant databases and provide the answer.

Dr. Wolfram says that the information in Wolfram Alpha is “curated,” meaning it is fact-checked by experts, unlike sites such as Wikipedia where anyone can contribute. To me, it is unclear how this would actually work and how many thousands of experts would be needed to check the veracity of every entry in their database. More importantly: Who arbitrates when experts disagree?

I have my own personal search test for them. Recently, in the Jardín, someone told me of their pleasant travel experience on a new Mexican bus line pronounced “aah-vay” and spelled “Ave.” The next time I was in front of my computer, I decided to check this out and immediately ran into trouble.

Google absolutely choked when I searched for “Ave bus line,” returning over 12,000,000 hits for every bus line on an Avenue. Refining the search to “Ave Mexican bus line” brought the search results down to a quarter million Avenues in Mexico, but still no hint of the “aah-vay” bus I was looking for.

This exercise reminded me that a lot of us are getting really tired of search engines that give us hundreds of pages of results that do not really have much of anything to do with what we are trying to find. We are all ready for that next-generation search engine, the one capable of understanding the question and not bombarding us with all those irrelevant results.

Oh yes, about the Ave luxury bus… All my searching on the internet was fruitless, and I cursed the stupidity of the corporate stuffed shirts who chose such a name for their company as Ave. This tale has a happy ending though, because the next time I passed through the bus station in Querétaro, I asked around and was pointed to a smiling señorita behind the Ave counter who told me she could be found on the internet at www.gruposenda.com.


Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044 (415) 101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.