Monday, September 27, 2010

SEARCH ENGINES - WOLFRAM ALPHA --- A specialized search engine - you decide, is it ready for the big leagues.

Wikipedia explains it. Lifehacker gave it pre-release praise. Try it, this link.

Is it ready to play major league - and never mind hitting a curve ball, try it on a fastball down the middle of the plate - these screenshot thumbnails - click one to enlarge and read it; first, the opening question:


Okay, not quite there, so goose it along a little with a hint - add SCOTUS to search line:


Hmm. Be yet more explicit, and see:


Not impressive. Among commercial search engines, Google, Bing and Ask, each got it right.


That is Google, in a Chrome browser, with the Search Cloudlet extension enabled for doing a focused search. Bing and Ask, next:



Appropriate to a Scalia question, Dogpile, (a meta-search engine [compilation of results returned by primary search engines]), identified Scalia-related things correctly:


Giving Wolfram Alpha a batting practice pitch or two indicates it might preform interesting and unique things such as giving a network graph structure to explore, in the event a question within its knowledge base is presented. I would not use it as a primary search engine, but for closing our search efforts, it might present something worthwhile. I am not entirely dismissive.




Wolfram Alpha did not return anything helpful on my searches of "Christian Legal Society" and "Federalist Society," so I gave up on it for that task; with the note that it will provide some information in some ways that other serach engines may not, depending on type of query.

Dogpile did give the scoop on both organizations. Among return list items; this and this, from a source I believe reliable; see, e.g., here, here and here.

___________UPDATE___________
For those wanting the question answered, The Gipper inflicted both Scalia and Thomas upon the nation. Another Reagan appointment, at the intermediate federal court level, Eighth Circuit, Roger Leland Wollman.

I note that because of interest in clerkships under Wollman, and in the course of a search thread; this Google, led to this Yahoo item; which led to this link on a former Wollman clerk; and then this tight and well written analysis of the Skilling decision; noting that a particular statute was limited to bribery and kickback situations, in terms of requiring the "honest services" of say a public office holder. Here is a link to an online copy of the Skilling opinion, where at p.49 it gets into a lengthy analysis of how the "honest services" statute should be read, in a narrowed but not overly narrow sense - sufficiently narrow to preserve constitutionality. The Skilling opinion reads the statute to apply in bribery and kickback conspiracy situations - with Justice Ginsberg's majority opinion reviewing the applicable "pre-McNally" line of law. With the opinion 114 pages long, I encourage interested readers to study it. I will not, and will only be left wondering about whether that particular statute might reach a state legislator putting a bill in the hopper for state money to be spent in a way either ultimately intended to inure to the legislator's personal benefit in whole or in part; and/or to his employer's pecuniary benefit; i.e., are citizens being denied fully "honest services" in such a hypothetical circumstance. I suppose a full analysis of possible bribery and/or kickback dimensions of the hypothetical would need to be fleshed out before the possible reach of the statute might be applied to reach a host of persons arguably involved in such a hypothetical conspiracy. I suppose a practiced legal mind such as County Attorney candidate Brad Johnson (or his official election opponent Tony Palumbo) might be better able to sort things out in any actual factual situation than I could, in a hypothetical.