I just read about a new search AI dubbed Wolfram Alpha (WolframAlpha.com) in an article that was published on Sunday May 3 in The Independent. It talks about this new search engine AI invented by Dr. Stephen Wolfram which supposedly “understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does”. Skimming through the article, I can’t remember getting this excited about a site since learning about the MetaWeb/Freebase API, but after scratching the surface a little bit, the excitement faded away very quickly.

Let me start by saying that I can’t say that I’m very knowledgeable or up to date when it comes to the academic research on the subject - apart from following a few AI and Semantic Web blogs. Now, the thing that immediately raised my eyebrows was a little time line of the history of the Internet which listed a handful of milestones - with the most recent item reading “2009 Dr Stephen Wolfram launches Wolfram Alpha.”, listed right after the traditional stuff that you would expect to see (ARPANET, first PC etc). For a site that is not even public (as of Monday May 4, 2009), it seems awfully rash to have it on a list like that.

Reading the fine print confirmed more and more of my skepticism. For instance, Dr. Wolfram admits that information in the engine is first “curated” or assessed by experts AND it also requires approximately 1,000 people for maintaining the site’s databases and keeping current with new information. All this begs to question how exactly is this an AI or anything revolutionary? And to top that off, the end of the article mentions that Google already is working on something similar which is already live. Wow! - Revolutionary - let’s credit Dr. Wolfram and say a loud Amen.

A person’s past is perhaps the best way to look for clues and Dr. Wolfram is no exception. This is where Dr. Dubya appears to have a solid track record as a self-indulgent hype machine. Consider for instance the overwhelmingly negative feedback and concerns about originality for his supposedly epic ‘10 years in the making’ book ironically titled “A New Kind of Science”. A New Kind of Search-Engine? - No, I doubt so.

So, I’m sure most of you heard about Chrome, Google’s new browser by now. Well I have to tell you - as a developer - the idea of having to support yet another browser is outright frightening to me. On the other hand, anyone who has any experience closing Firefox multiple times a day due to gigantic JS memory leaks can attest to the potential benefit that this new browser can bring to the table.

Chrome has found its place among an impressive and ever growing line-up of beta services and products that have been rolled out just in the last year.

• Android

  Will this be an iPhone without fascist limitations?

• KNOL

  Are Google going to be able to battle it out with Wikipedia?

• Google Apps

  Ok, this isn’t that recent, but its free. Microsoft Office anyone?

• Google Health

  Going after Microsoft Health Vault?

• Google App-Engine

  Ouch! Amazon EC2, Slicehost & co - you just got sliced.

• OpenSocial

  Could be a threat to Facebook?

• Lively

  Second-life with mass-appeal?

So, what do you make of it? Some endeavors obviously stand out having more potential than others, and one thing is clear: the 20% of Employee Innovation time is paying off in way of innovation. The big question on my mind, however, is how Google manages these projects internally and exactly what financial homework is made before a project gets a green light.

The concept of grid-based layouts has been around since the 1950’s and the first time I came across it was actually in an old book about print design that I picked up while I was in college. Early on, I kind of developed my own conventions with regards to grids and tended to design sites to be 780px in width, since this number leaves enough margin for a vertical scrollbar on 800×600 resolution and more importantly, can be divided in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 columns giving you a flexible, symmetric grid design for your layout.

Most e-commerce sites I work on still have about 10-15% of users using 800×600 resolution, but when we built futurevacations.com, the designer we used for the project used a layout that was 960 pixels wide, which from the look of it didn’t look out of the ordinary to me until all the HTML and CSS was done and I realized we might have problems.

Now, I do have to admit that I rarely browse too many web-design blogs these days - its an area that I have been knowingly neglecting the past 6 years since I started developing a greater interest for programming languages and software design. Anyhow, for futurevacations.com, we decided to keep our layout at 960px in width since it gives us more screen-estate to work with and those 800×600 users will likely diminish significantly over the lifespan of the site, so we felt pretty good about how this worked out.

So, the past month after we rolled out the site, I have to admit I was curious to find out why this seemingly arbitrary number of 960px was chosen, but ironically, I was not curious enough to look for answers. Today however, I stumbled across a blog that made a reference to the 960 Grid System, developed by Nathan Smith. Upon reading more, everything started making more sense; 960 is in fact an ideal width for a grid-based layout since it is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. If you are interested, his site contains a download that contains some useful stuff like a .psd and some HTML and CSS to go with it. Enjoy!