Last week Wolfram Alpha launched, and I immediately started playing around with it. Like every other search engine Wolfram focuses on being able to take your input and try to return the data you’re looking for, but don’t expect it to grab results like those you find at Google. Instead Wolfram tries to read content from over a thousand different sites so that it can bring you the exact data you’re looking for… without having to click on any links.
If you enter in a city, for example, it will give you details like population, current time, current weather, and other details that might be useful. Or if you enter in a name it will return some stats that have been taken from the United States census:
Overall I’d have to say that I’m pretty impressed with the amount of data they’ve not only been able to collect, but have also been able to display in a friendly and readable format. The only thing I don’t like is that no results get returned when you try to enter what a typical user might be searching for at, let’s say, Google. If you’re not searching for something that’s math or science related there’s probably a good chance that Wolfram won’t be able to help you. I think what they need to do is grab some of the top Google results as well, and display them when Wolfram doesn’t have an answer. At least then the user wouldn’t come up empty handed. In their defense they do have a “search the web” box in the sidebar that will pull up the Google search results page for that query, but I don’t find that to be all that helpful.
What I’d really like to see come out of this is to have Google acquire them, and just integrate all of this technology directly into their search results. Google already does this for some things with what’s called OneBox results (for converting between units, finding the time in another city, etc…), but this would make it leaps and bounds more useful. Who knows… maybe this will end up getting acquired by one of the big companies out there.
This has been hailed as a Google competitor. I completely disagree. Use Google if you’re looking for a wide array of options. If you’re just looking for quickly/easily accessible hard data in the scientific or mathematical fields, you’ll probably do all right with Wolfram. I don’t -think- they’re going to let Google acquire them, but I can’t say I’ve heard them explicitly say they won’t.
However, the infrastructure is totally different. Wolfram is much higher maintenance than Google. By that I mean Wolfram requires a curator to input data into a database. Google is pretty much simply keyword-oriented, so it can bring up pages simply with an algorithm that reads time published, keywords, page visits, and other back-end information. So Google as it stands wouldn’t be able to add that much to Wolfram (in my opinion).
One problem even with Wolfram’s hard data, though, is exemplified by Ars Technica’s quote: “Data on my search result page indicated that, in 2003, global human activity led to 27 Gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions. But it also indicated that, in 2000, the US produced 40 Gigatons during cement production alone. One of these has got to be wrong, and Alpha gives you absolutely no way of finding out which …” (as quoted by Newsy)
So the morale of the story? Handle with care. I expect it to get much more useful as the feedback starts flowing, though.
Heck no, Google has to stay out of this! It’s one of the last awesome websites on the internet that isn’t owned by the big ol’ Google.
They could perhaps license their content to Google though. As Daniel already pointed out, Wolfram is a complement rather than a competitor of Google.
Agree that it’s doing something different than Google but can see how Google is scared(?) of it. It’s more inventive than Google has been with search in a long time.
Also great easter eggs.
[mashable.com]
I was looking for those. I sorta assumed they were out there.
It’s not bad, this site is informative. But it’s something that I would use when I am bored at work.
That is a really good way of putting it. Maybe Google will eventually allow “gadgets/widgets” to be displayed next to the search results, and the gadgets will be able to read the search parameters. Something like that would be cool.
Nice… some of those are pretty funny.