May 18, 2009 | Interesting Web Sites, News

Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine from Wolfram Research, the makers of the widely used Mathematica software, was launched on Friday. Before then, it was teasing earlybirds with this graphic:

Post launch

After the launch, heavy usage by new users led to frequent overloads, during which the system would was humorously programmed by Wolfram to mimic HAL 9000, the talking computer from Space Odyssey:

Today, however, would be the first full business day for Wolfram Alpha, and it’s expected to get a flood of users. It’s to be seen how it’ll hold up. I think Wolfram must have gotten more than it bargained for.

Here’s what the home page looks like now:

A typical search

Wolfram protests that, contrary to many reports, Alpha isn’t a Google killer because it’s not a search engine. Rather, it’s a “computational knowledge engine”. That means, to follow an example given in the Techonology Review article, if you search for “GDP of France and Mexico,” the result will be not a list of webpages about such GDP’s, but rather the GDP info itself, in various text and graphic formats:

What’s interesting is that if you click on the table data, you get a popup that allows you to copy the text:

The problem is the pipe symbols (i.e.: | ) won’t tell your spreadsheet program to format the data as tabular if you cut and paste into it. It might have been better to use tabs as delimiters.

You get the same popup if you click on a chart, but there’s no useful data:

The orange text at the bottom of the is hypertext; you can click on it to start a new Alpha query with that text. (The link isn’t set to automatically open in a new window, so if you left click them, the query replaces the current query in the current browser window).

Granted that, with Google, you have to seek out facts within webpages instead of being handed them on a platter. But once you’re on the webpage, you already have a web address citation. With Alpha, you get the facts first, and then you have to seek out the sources. To get them, click on “Source information” at the bottom of the results:

The source citations are links, so you can click them to open them up for more information. This time, the links are set to open up in a new window. One problem, though, is there isn’t necessarily a correlation between a specific fact and a specific source.

Conclusion

Wolfram Alpha is definitely not in the same league as Google. It’s not a better or worse search engine, it’s categorically different. I think it’s definitely going to be useful for basic, and even advanced research.

Note: due to an apparent misconfiguration, the URL http://wolframalpha.com/ doesn’t seem to work. The www variant, http://www.wolframalpha.com/, does work. I think this is a foreshadowing that Wolfram will continue to have little snags in its knowledge engine implementation.

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11 Responses to “Wolfram Alpha, a New Kind of Search Engine, Is Live”

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