Wolfram Alpha: The new search engine, not Google’s rival

Rumors say it’s the next ‘Google killer’ (haven’t we already heard this? Cuil, maybe?) others, the next-generation search engine. Truth is, it’s just the beginning of Wolfram Alpha, the new computational search engine, which was recently unveiled just last week.

Wikipedia defines Wolfram Alpha as an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, instead of providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer.

Wolfram Alpha’s creator, Steven Wolfram, both a physicist and software developer, who not only received his PhD. at the age of 20 but who has also launched one of the most powerful computational software in its field, Mathematica, is quite clear his invention will not be stealing marketshare from Google, especially at the early stage in which it is in.

The new engine is actually quite simple. It follows basically the same Google principle in that you type in your query in a small input box, however, results are rendered differently. While Google’s results provide users with pages and pages of links and recent articles related to the searvh query, Wolfram Alpha plots out a single answer for you.

Not only that, the engine also offers the most accurate calculations from questions such as the number of vertices on a great rhombic triacontahedron (182) or what gene is 456 base pairs upstream of another given gene, as explained by Bryan Bergstein from the Associated Press.

To give you an idea of what it looks like, this article on ReadWriteWeb displays a series of screenshots containing the different results generated by the search engine according to the different queries, ie: Oakland, California.

Along the same vein, the comparison run on MIT’s Technology Review between Google results and Wolfram results is also very interesting to look at as to understand how the engines both rationalize data in their very own ways.

And lastly, I will leave you with this video containing Steven himself presenting a sneak preview to Wolfram Alpha:

It seems like no search engine we’ve seen, including this one, comes close to making the quantum leap in performance required to get Internet users to switch over from one engine to the other. But then again, it’s too soon to tell. Differences however, are quite obvious; Google is an engine that provides its users with a list of relevant webpages which eventually lead you to the information you’re looking for, whereas Wolfram Alpha is more about presenting quantified numeric data and data comparisons.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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