Search engines are a dime a dozen. Anyone remember Cuil? But with WolframAlpha, Stephan Wolfram has a new kind of search engine in mind, and he has the track record to make one think he can do it.
Wolfram is best known for the program Mathematica, which is computational software used widely in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields. WolframAlpha builds on his work with Mathematica and his book, A New Kind of Science and applies it to search.
Wolfram Alpha is set to launch in May of this year. In a blog post on his own site, Wolfram describes the project.
The idea is to use natural language input, and rather than returning a ton of links that may or may not be related to what you are searching for, return the actual answer instead. I mean, many queries are based on wanting to find some information, after all.
Now that would be exciting, if he can pull it off. And here are some interesting insights by Nova Spivak, CEO of Radar Networks:
In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a "computational knowledge engine" for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.
Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What is the location of Timbuktu?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?," "What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?," "What is the 307th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"
You'll only get factual output, though, as WolframAlpha is not designed to be AI. You're not going to be able to ask it the meaning of life. And thus, don't worry: you're not going to see it turn into a Skynet or a Colossus: The Forbin Project.
At least, for now.
But at any rate, it won't be publicly available until May, so we'll have to wait until then to see if it garners any real market share, gets acquired (by Google?) or fades into the distance.
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