So who said it first?

New search features released by Google in May 2010 enable you to narrow down search results by time and keywords. Now in couple minutes you can find the original author – of course with an assumption that all content is indexed by Google!

If you use standard search queries you will probably find that it was Gerd Leonhard. In order to find the first result I had to use a combination of phrase match, negative terms, change the sort order and specify date range. The search phrase does almost look like a piece of code.

Here’s the final Google query “data is the new oil” -site:www.mediafuturist.com -@garyr0binson -leonhard -gleonhard

You will see the first result is linking to the speech delivered by Meglena Kuneva (EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner) in Brussels on 31st March 2009. Ms Kuneva said “Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world” . If you trust Google she is creator & original author of this powerful quote.

See the differences in the table below and feel free to adda comment if you think I missed anything.

At the same time I have to say I’m very excited about the Wolfram|Alpha project and I wish it had been available few years ago when I was still at the uni.

Title
Search Engine	Yes – google is indexing the web and returning list of pages	No – it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base
Free	Yes	Yes, free for personal noncommercial use
Audience	Mainstream audience, thanks to its simplicity	Everyone, but given its complexity and it will attract mainly academic audience
Link with information source	connects users with information source	connects users with information
Database updates	real-time dependent on the indexing frequency	potentially real-time subject to manual data input and approval
Typical queries	general interest, shopping	scientific, academic
Business model	Mainly Pay Per Click contextual ads	Paid subscriptions with enhanced features for large-scale and commercial use and business partnerships
Fundations	1995: Based on a search engine called BackRub, BackRub operated on Stanford servers from 1995	1988: Wolfram|Alpha is built on the Wolfram Mathematica system, which has been in continual development since 1988
Languages	41	English only
Limitations	authority based on PageRank, lack of common data structure	Wolfram|Alpha can only know things that are known, and are somehow public. It only deals with facts, not opinions
Key strenghts	Simplicity and a wide range of knowledge/data	computation and mathematics
Data checks	Mainly automated and managed by Google spam team. But, given its mainstream audience highly affected by spam	Automated and manual, including exper review. Less likely to be targeted by spammers
Data upload	No – data needs to be published on the web	Yes – submission process sumilar to wikipedia
Private personal information	Yes	No. It contains only information that is considered public.
Adult content	Yes, particularly when SafeSearch Filtering is off	No. It has no adult images or narrative. It gives only factual answers to factual questions.

Conclusion
Many similarities but they are two completely different tools – targeting different audience.

I think Wolfram|Alpha has its right to exist as a niche and reliable tool for research and I’m sure there are businesses who will pay for additional features. What do you think?

Price discrimination exists when identical products are transacted at different prices from the same seller. In terms of Internet, it means that people who have more time to do research have more chances of finding a better deal, i.e. are able to buy a product or a service at lower price. The article also says that barriers to entry still exist as the marketing costs might be at very high level. This is mainly related to the fact that not every company can affort to spend money on Pay Per Click advertising or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services. This proves that both arguments are relevant in World Wide Web, however, they do not necessarily apply to the Semantic Web project.

The Tanya Gupta and Abir Qasem in their article “Reduction of price dispersion through Semantic E-commerce: A Position Paper” proves that information assymentry in Semanic Web won’t exist and the price discrimination will be highly reduced. How about barriers to entry? In today’s web, where most of the websites traffic comes from search engines, we can distinguish between organic/natural search results and paid search (Pay Per Click) results. However, even in the Semantic Web perfect information market there will be companies eager to pay to advertise new products or services. Would this advertising and marketing activities create any additional revenue? If all potential customers already have a full access to the information they need to make rational buying decision spending money on paid ads won’t be effective from economical point of view. However, if Semantic Web doesn’t offer real-time enviroment paid ads might still prove to be effective and profitable in short term.