Free knowledge base searching

I’ve just been trying out Wolfram|Alpha which went live a few days ago, and it’s really quite impressive. Essentially what it is is an extensive knowledge base that generates the presentation of your query, and fills the gap between Google and Wikipedia quite effectively. You can look up individual items, such as places or names, or feed it more complex comparisons and computations.

For example, a comparison of the Voyager missions or the ingredients of Coke or a list of Saturn’s moons. You tend to get better results with more technical queries. Apparently, more extensive pop-culture data will come later to answer such burning questions as ‘how many Harry Potter books have been sold?’

Oh, and the query ‘what is the meaning of life?’ returned the correct answer of 42. Go try it out!

Second thing is this interesting article on the unfortunate truth of Internet companies: that the vast majority of their userbase growth is in countries where attempts to monetise off advertising alone are effectively useless. Have a read: In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit.

With the exception of Google (who IS an advertising company), most of the big, popular sites are only being propped up by venture capitalists. For example, Digg lost $4 million on $6.4 million of revenue in the first three quarters of 2008*, Google has yet to earn back it’s $1.65 billion investment in YouTube, and Facebook sure isn’t turning a profit*.

This is actually something that I’d wondered about before, as living in Australia a lot of Internet advertising I’m exposed to is clearly and wholly targeted at Americans. I wonder how long this subsidised global networking will last. Will we look back in 10 years with nostalgic memories of all those ad-subsidised services vying for our attention and the existence of easily accessible, massively powerful bases of knowledge like Wolfram|Alpha? Another burst in the Dot-Com bubble where all the advertisers bail? Could a donations system like Wikipedia’s ever work for social networking?