“The future of search may look a little like Kirsten Goldenberg, a 14-year-old high-school student in Los Angeles,” William M. Bulkeley reports for Technology Review. “When she needs help with a homework problem, she no longer turns on her laptop to bring up Google’s search box. Instead, she pushes the microphone button on her iPhone and asks Siri, the sassy digital assistant that understands voice questions.”
“‘You can ask Siri anything, and if she doesn’t understand, she’ll ask if she should search the Web. It’s really helpful,’ says Goldenberg, who sold her collection of American Girl dolls on eBay to raise funds to buy the new Apple phone when it came out in October,” Bulkeley reports. “Some analysts now believe Siri could disrupt Google’s dominance of one of the most valuable franchises in technology: search-engine advertising.”
Bulkeley reports, “BIf a user asks Siri for ‘the best’ Chinese food or a ‘nearby’ Honda dealership, Siri defers to Yelp’s website, where dedicated ‘Yelpers’ have posted their opinions and ratings. Ask it for a specific fact, such as the circumference of the Earth, and Siri will try to retrieve the information from Wolfram Alpha, a search engine that answers factual and mathematical questions… Luc Barthelet, executive director of Wolfram Research, which also makes the software program Mathematica, says that the week the iPhone 4, featuring Siri, came out, the number of queries to Wolfram Alpha increased 20-fold.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “62Sparkplug” for the heads up.]