Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
Wolfram Alpha Versus Google: Rethinking The Web
Share: 
by Yuliya Talmazan | May 18, 2009 at 01:53 pm
207 views | 0 Recommendations | 4 comments
Photos
Wolfram Alpha is a new ‘answer-engine’ developed by Wolfram Research. The engine service was made available today, May 18, 2009, but already it is generating plenty of stir in the tech circles. What is new and fresh about Wolfram Alpha is that this search engine actually computes answers from input data instead of providing a list of web pages where the answer to your query can be found the way that Google currently does it. Thus, instead of getting a myriad of pages to look through in order to find the information you are looking for, Wolfram Alpha displays the needed information immediately, if your query suits the format of Wolfram Alpha databases.
So, if you are a news junkie, keying in “Obama Netanyahu” into Wolfram Alpha will yield nothing. Whereas, Google will pick up news posts about today’s meeting of President Obama and Israeli PM Netanyahu at the White House. However, keying in just "Obama" or "Netanyahu" will unearth basic wikipedia-like information about each of them without having to click on any links. Wolfram’s creators are also claiming that the data in their search engine is expert-level as opposed to crowd-generated Wikipedia's databases. So, Wikipedia, take notice! At least for now, Wolfram seems to be all about the quality rather than profit. Interestingly, for every query, Wolfram provides related links to Wikipedia and…wait for it…Google as well. But all in all, the engine has little value for news searching. It is great for emergency fact checking, but Google is still #1 when it comes to searching for news. Wolfram creators admit that digging popular culture information is not the engine’s forte and is still a work in process for them.
Created by physicist Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha has a purely mathematical mind, being best suited for spewing out instantaneous answers to queries like “pi squared?”, “capital of Egypt?”, “how many weeks in a year?”, “how far is Earth from Sun?” etc. I can definitely envision Wolfram Alpha being exploited as a cheat-sheet resource by tech-savvy students during exams, as there are way fewer clicks involved in yielding basic answers through Wolfram Alpha than though browsing Google.
Despite being able to answer unthinkable queries, the engine seems to be having problems pulling info for abbreviations like BBC, NASA or NBA, while still recognizing some of the more famous ones like UN, EU or LTTE.
Wolfram also gets confused by words that carry dual meanings. That way, searching for “blackberry” yields fruit caloric values rather than the different models of a smartphone, whereas Google displays RIM and Wikipedia blackberry smartphone links straight up. But with eerie, almost human-like abilities to analyze queries, there is no question that this search engine will learn and adapt fast.
What is your take on this? Do you think Wolfram Alpha will break the dogmas to revolutionize web search, or will it choke in its own ingenuity?
Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information.
"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for."
Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com
"It's like plugging into an electric brain."
Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com
"This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them."
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (4)
at 17:49 on May 18th, 2009
With the fact presented here and the test I made for this wolfram engine, the title should not be wolfram alpha vs google but wolfram alpha next to google like any other assuming engines.. Further more, it appears as an information verifier for me and it really works well and amazing at that. As for prediction, I think it would override wikipedia soon if not rival..
at 18:48 on May 18th, 2009
Wolfram alpha is not that accurate. I tried searching for a term CPU (which I know is Central Process Unit of a computer) but it returns a city and whatsoever unrelated details.
at 22:14 on May 20th, 2009
Where I think Wolfram Alpha is a good idea, how can it be deemed the biggest internet revolution for a generation even before its launch!
So you can ask a computer a question, so what. You get the same answers as a search engine, but maybe a little faster. The answers are still only as reliable as the pages indexed by Wolfram. I don't understand why it would be a revolution.
For example, FaceBook and Social Networking sites are considered a revolution of the internet because t bringing the ability of quickly communicating with the masses relatively easy and free. But Alpha is just similar to a site like Wikipedia, where it collects information from it users, but it displays it in a friendly short answer form.
I could see a service like Alpha being integrated with Google as an added bonus, like the same way you would do a calculation with Google. But I don't think that the site as a whole will expand as expected in real life. People are just too busy and inorent to try something new, when something like Google provided many services under one roof
at 09:38 on July 3rd, 2009
A search engine which have to go through a right of passage and having a much more catchy name to beat Google.
How to build a shed