By: Billy Beerslugger
So what is the Wolfram|Alpha? It is a computational knowledge engine. Well what the fuck is that, you’re asking? It’s complicated. However, from what I gather it’s not unlike a search engine such as Google. Where it differs though is it’s use of natural language (in terms of a search query from you the user) to determine answers/results as opposed to keywords like Google.
Wolfram also will try to display a visualization if possible from what you are searching for. From an article I read, “A better way to think of it is a DWIMM (“do what I might mean”), so if you type in something like “gdp France / Germany”, it calculates and returns a graph of the relative fraction of France’s annual GDP to Germany’s GDP, over the last 30 years or so. If you just type in “gdp”, it looks up your local host and (in my case) displays the GDP of the USA over the last 30 years, plus various pieces of information about what gross domestic product is, from a mathematical formula perspective but not from a semantic one. It does not have an ontology, so what it knows about, say, GDP, or population, or stock price, is no more nor less than the equations that involve that term. One vulnerability that this engenders in Alpha is that errors in the data may go unnoticed for a long time; a positive way of saying this is that one could align Alpha’s terms to an ontology and knowledge base, and use it to catch some fraction of errors as outright implausible violations of basic knowledge (e.g., Miami’s population dropping by exactly a factor a ten during the month of October, 2006.)”
Now how does this effect the search engine landscape? I don’t know if it does. Google seems to be able to handle a wider range of searches more accurately and Wolfram seems to handle a more finite amount of selected datum a lot better. Google is not going anywhere any time soon.
I’m not going to pretend I know any more about Wolfram then the people who’s articles I’ve read on it and a Wikipedia post, but there’s a lot of Buzz about this coming from nerdery’s all over the world.
I signed up to be have early release access but I think they are looking for somone with a little more credentials then running a blog. We’ll see though.
Could Wolfram Alpha be your default search engine in 5 years? Could it have an IPO ala Google and fetch millions upon millions? Only time will tell.
Note: Wolfram Alpha will launch sometime this month!