Wolfram Alpha launched
Today saw the official launch of Wolfram Alpha - a search engine designed to revolutionise search by intelligently answering questions rather than just directing users to appropriate web pages.
The experimental website, named after its British-born inventor Stephen Wolfram, has been hyped as a potential rival for leading search engine Google.
However, Wolfram Alpha is styled by its creator as a “computational knowledge engine” rather than a direct competitor to traditional search engines, and delivers answers to fact-based questions by using computational power to interpret its huge databases.
Among the example problems it can solve are “What is the distance between these cities?”, “How old is Barack Obama?” and “What is the chemical formula of sulphuric acid?”
Answers and related information are then presented in a neat table, often complete with charts and other supplemental data. Its strength, say the scientific team behind it, is that by interpreting the available information it can provide an answer to questions that have not already been asked and answered elsewhere.
Early feedback on the service has been mixed, with those expecting a Google-killer likely to be disappointed by the service’s functionality.
“They’re saying they’re not trying to wipe out Google, but they feel they do the kinds of searches that Google doesn’t handle. If you’re trying to get facts, this might be a handy kind of encyclopedia for you,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief at Search Engine Land.
The service is available to try for free at wolframalpha.com. Advertising support and paid versions of the tool including extra features are planned for inclusion as part of the long-term project.
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