Get ready to get excited about something pretty geeky. It’s a whole new way of searching. And it’s just been released in beta.
ISEdb.com reported in March about the soon-to-be launch of
WolframAlpha. Since then, a whole lot of excitement, accompanied by
concerns, has arisen.
If there is anything out there that has been making Google sweat a
little bit, it’s WolframAlpha. In fact, Google demonstrated its
insecurity by coinciding their major semantic web innovation
announcements with WolframAlpha’s important events (including
announcing G-Squared on the eve of the WolframAlpha launch).
Perhaps they are worried because the idea behind the new processor is that we should be expecting more from our search engines.
Just launched last month, the new search engine has been featured in
the most recent issue of Technology Review, where it is hailed as being
a leader in the future of search. WolframAlpha’s quest: to make
knowledge computable.
Mathematician, scientist, and all-around genius (or so his awards
show), Stephen Wolfram noticed that the Semantic Web everyone talks
about just wasn’t going to come about on its own. So he decided to do
it himself.
Using his software Mathematica, extremely popular with number
crunchers worldwide, WolframAlpha has been developed as a
‘computational knowledge engine’, meaning that, using complex
algorithms built in to Mathematica’s software, WolframAlpha is meant to
compute answers instead of just listing a bunch of different sources
where you have to find them yourself.
It’s the kind of technology that Captain Kirk had on his Starship
enterprise – ask a question and get a very intelligent,
well-researched, specific answer complete with fancy graphics. Well,
that’s the idea. But there are still some glitches to be worked out.
There is still much the search engine doesn’t know. As Technology
Review put it, WolframAlpha is a library with its shelves half-full. A
frequent search result is “WolframAlpha isn’t sure what to do with your
input.”
It has also been burdened with complaints about its lack of specific
documentation. While clicking links does reveal a variety of sources,
nothing explains which source in particular provides the specific
information.
Alexa reveals that after the massive traffic spike just after the
program’s launch mid-May, traffic has dropped dramatically, putting it
not even in the same realm as Google.
However, the search engine is still young, and time to work out bugs
is on their side. Individual users are even welcomed to submit their
own information, in a Wikipedia-type style; however, Wolfram maintains
that the information will be handled and reviewed by his experts before
it gets published.
The search engine looks to be, despite its flaws, terribly
impressive. Technology Review called it “detailed, intelligent, and
graphically stunning.”
Wolfram has certainly brought us far closer to the Semantic Web than
we’ve ever been before – and that much closer to those Star Trek
computers we all dreamed of when we were kids.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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