Back in May 2009, Stephen Wolfram launched an ambitious effort that seemed likely to re-carve the landscape of internet search — www.WolframAlpha.com. Stephen’s project provides precise [and sometimes amusing] answers to what seems to be nearly every category under the scientific sun.
With Statistics, Physics, Geography, Medicine and Nutrition to name just a few, WolframAlpha search is unequivocally a stellar scientific tool. Using it though [for everyday search] is like walking into a physics class to find a recipe on how to make meatballs.
Compare WolframAlpha with Google on the other hand and you’ll find Google is more like walking into your local library to find a book on, well, just about anything. Google’s scientific and statistical search response may not be as polished and precise as Wolfram’s, but nonetheless the data is out there. What Google does that WolframAlpha doesn’t is give
So now that everyone has spent their hour or so wishfully plugging search strings into WolframAlpha, has the hype faded? Or is Stephen Wolfram just scratching the surface of our world’s future in intelligence-based internet search.
Can WolframAlpha become the next omniscient community library.
Still a ways to go — If you search WolframAlpha for ‘rich chuckrey?’, you get zero. Not even a blip of my existence. I’m quite certain WolframAlpha’s awareness of my ‘existence’ is a low priority for entry into the WoflramAlpha database, but this is where the relevance of Wolfram’s search engine lies [and currently ends]. Google however knows who I am on Twitter and other social networks.
Plugging through WolframAlpha gives me a feeling that much of what’s returned back through its search engine is 99.999999% textbook response. No better than a scientific bot.
It may very well be that, on August 29, 2029, deep space algorithmic calculations predict WolframAlpha will become self-aware. But until that sci-fi day comes, for current practical and even scientific search, Google still rules the day. Even Bing has come to the table with strong search relevance whereas WolframAlpha is [by far] still a static scientific calculator geared more for that high school science project or college physics thesis.
Google take note: The potential for a new internet search order makes Stephen Wolfram’s futuristic vision for WolframAlpha a key milestone in search engine development. Where Stephen takes his project next might just shape the future of world wide web search.
I used WA a few times and found it far less than desirable. The results plainly suck and the output is not formatted all that well. I'm definitely not a fan.
August 4, 2009 @ 20:29
Neither am I, Scott. It was a lot of exciting hype that left me wondering. Not that I prefer Google over WA, but I found myself finding ways to duplicate WA results in Google search. Probably a result of doubting WA or possibly wanting to show that a better and more branched reply from Google exists.
August 5, 2009 @ 00:16
I used WA a couple times and just found it painful to do pretty much anything I wanted to and quickly tried to forget its existence. It's got a bit of novelty but for plain searching Google is still the best.
August 5, 2009 @ 21:32
It's not trying to be google. It never says its a search engine, it's a computational knowledge engine. It gets certain data, and lets you compare related things. It's not trying to excel at knowing who you are, what it's doing is making textbook information more accessible and useful. Why would you expect a computational engine to know who you are?
For example, type in “rigel, sun, polaris”, and it will give you a side-by-side comparison of numbers and graphs for the three stars you will never find with google. Type in “Apple, google, microsoft” to see a comparison of numbers from the three companies. It's difficult to find the number of employees for any of those companies on google, and 100% impossible to find it for all three at once. If you had to compare numbers or stats from three or more things, it makes this tool priceless as a time saver.
You can even use it to compare the locations of web companies. A search of “bit.ly twitter.com” tells you they are both located in the same place, and shows alexa stats on them too.
If you try to use it like google, you'll get crap.
August 11, 2009 @ 15:24