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Limitations of Knowledge Engines

Wolfram|Alpha was advertised as a revolutionary knowledge engine designed to eclipse Google. The result is quite mixed. While the power of symbolic computation certainly helped people solve mathematical problems, Wolfram|Alpha still provides highly eccentric answers to queries like iOS. Instead of giving a description of Apple's flagship OS, the query results in a obscure Greek island. The knowledge engine even ignores case sensitivity. The far-from-satisfactory performance begs lots of questions. First is about knowledge model. Wolfram|Alpha works as a interpreter between human queries and knowledge databases. Given the sheer volume of human knowledge, it's natural that pure knowledge databases omit huge areas of public knowledge, and Wolfram|Alpha can only cover a very restricted domain. Compared with search engine's wide indexing of web pages, which of course contains falsehoods, Wolfram|Alpha is cleaner, but also very much less encyclopediac. How about depth? The trag...
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Web of Deceit

Snowden complained that Google churned out misinformation and disinformation in addition to the right answer. Since Google is a search engine, rather than a knowledge engine, misinformation and disinformation served on the web, indexed by Google, pose real problems. Clearly, everyone should be educated to verify Internet content. However, the situation today has roots deeper than a search engine. The fundamental tenet of Internet freedom, net neutrality, specifically allowed misinformation and disinformation to be established and spread through the entire network. Digital rights activists tend to view net neutrality as a sacred principle, and yet refuse to accept the logical conclusion that proliferation of bullshit is protected. Freedom of speech accentuated by the Internet may produce bullshit at gigantic scale. It's hard to argue against freedom of speech. Thus, the hope is to reduce amplification of bullshit on the Internet. Banning accounts help, but systematic resolution re...
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