Wolfram Alpha wows geeks
19 May 2009
Computational-knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha went live on Friday following weeks of speculation that it would revolutionise search or pose a challenge to Google. (See: British professor launches search engine to rival Google)
According to its founder, physicist-turned-software developer Stephen Wolfram, the engine is a synthesis of the world's knowledge in a computable form. It can solve complex engineering problems and also give details of a company's history, financials and graphs on its performance from a company's ticker symbol.
He said that the engine was currently only at an initial stage of development and that it was a long-term project.
He said that they were trying to make as much as the world's knowledge computable, integrating all the world's data, methods, models and algorithms accumulated in our civilization and making it immediately computable.
People who have had the opportunity to watch the presentation of the new search engine, after a few glitches in it were fixed by the weekend have generally raved about it.
On the Wolfram Alpha blog, responses have been mostly complimentary. Users have typically reported being bowled over after watching the presentation. One wowed user went on to say the he just keeled over after watching the presentation and it was the biggest thing that happened to search since Google.
But tech reviewers have called the engine a tool for geeks, not the average user. They say that Alpha does not really compete with Google in its present form and will not take market-share away from Google or even Wikipedia, as it can give its users quick and easy access to a whole range of data.
One reviewer described it as a 'black box' that spits out answers rather than links to other sites. His queries served up semantic-type bugs that were no problem for Google to fix but Wolfram displayed results that said that the search engine was not designed to support Romanian.
According to another reviewer the engine would appeal most to technical specialists who needed to do a lot of number crunching, math etc. He adds that for most other people the search engine would not be useful.
One commentator has summed it up on a tech site noting that there was not much of a comparison to be made between Google and Wolfram as Wolfram made data computable while Google did nothing of that on the scale of Wolfram. He concludes that the search engine will likely never reach the appeal of Google, which was designed for a special audience.
