Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Answers Questions, Looks Amazing
Wolfram Alpha is a closed (for now) search engine that looks like an incredible hybrid between Wikipedia and Google’s OneBox answers for simple, common search queries—at least that’s what we’ve gathered from the demo video.
We haven’t actually been able to try the site out ourselves, but it launches sometime this month, so it won’t be long. Luckily the demo video embedded here walks through a lot of the possibilities this search engine offers, and those possibilities are mind-blowing—especially for a data lover. Unfortunately the video is a little blurry, so it’s not the best possible look at the up-and-coming engine.
Don’t think of Wolfram Alpha as a Google Killer, though, because frankly Google doesn’t really have anything like it, and we’ll have to wait and see how well Wolfram Alpha works when it gets in the hands of the public. Either way, Google will still corner the market on most normal search. (We’re not always looking for the kind of answers Wolfram Alpha provides when we hit up Google.) As for how this editor uses Google and Wikipedia, I’d actually imagine that Wolfram Alpha could be more of a Wikipedia competitor than a Google competitor.
Let’s hear what you think of the yet-to-be-released search engine in the comments.
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
This sounds like a teacher's worst nightmare, but a student's dream.
darkstar misses his preview button
It looks very fast :)
BFD. Nothing special. It's just yet another Google wannabe toy.
Then again, Stephen has a *HUGE* ego.
QADude
Looks like a rather simple search aggregator that defaults to considering input as "math" rather than "text".
I give it a solid "meh".
Sean Masters
This is awesome, but I don't think it will replace my Stumbling.
tok3n ninja; is behind you
I am speechless
That looks fantastic, I'm a huge wolfram (mathematica) fan and they never fail to impress!
greimel
Hours of fun, geeky, searching ahead...
Seeing some guy I don't know making searches against a closed search engine I've never tried looks great! It's like watching my 4 year old nephew playing video games.
I'm sure google will implement something along these lines in the near future.
Yerzriknot
How is it different from Powerset?
sample032
I think Google has a lot of bells and whistles that do things like this. Public records search is only the most recent, but they've been integrating one-off answers into the search results for a while now.
I wonder how useful the data is? Is this really going to save researchers time when they have to later go find more authoritative information?
mherlihy
This would have been a more impressive demo if a naive user were to try it publically and on camera. Wolfram knows what it knows. I'd like to see someone who doesn't know what it knows try it.
That said, it looks useful, though I can't sign on to "amazing" just yet. Might be, though.
@Jrsy Devil's Food Cake®: Even though they didn't, that's what was in my mind when I saw the title here.
GlennA
Good thing they didn't call it Wolfram & Hart. Then I'd have to think twice before using it..
Its a great idea in my opinion, would be pretty useful to replace wikipedia for a while, but just like you said we will have to wait and see how it does.
@darkstar misses his preview button: Sounds like something helpful then!
As a medical student I think this will be fantastically useful - from about 9 minutes in I was VERY excited - looks like a great resource...
I think the most important thing about Wolfram's service is that its a major leap forward for Natural Language processing that will be available for the everyday user
BattistaCincinnatus
If I see what can be queried by services such as DBPedia from the Wikipedia (or see Sindice), I am not that impressed about Wolfram Alpha at all. It is just a better visualizer of data.
NashMojojojo
"Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Answers Questions Looks Amazing" Why not? It`s logical! The Norwegian SQL ? It reminds me that: The natural language query style with DCG from Colmerauer who was in Grenoble(Chamonix) mountaineering with me and paying his Marseille Prolog II-"Standleitung "[German language] with Quebec.
IverPerseus
Jesus Christ has no-one here used something like an interactive multimedia CD-ROM, like microsoft encarta?
Seriously there is nothing new or impressive here really.
So far to me that as a web service would be more useful to the average punter.
This is more for scientific knowledge surfing.
snowcrash
I'd like to say that's amazing but it looks a bit dull. Surely good for something scientific.... perhaps. Also this must be up there as the most soporific presentation ever. nnghghhhh. I'll still be trying it out though : )
GiulioCachifa
Wolfram created this using about 6 million lines of Mathematica code.
He said in other videos that the practicality of undertaking such a project like Wolfram|Alpha without Mathematica as a high-level base language would have been close to nil.
If he approaches anything close to the success that he has had with Mathematica, W|A will become just as important to our everyday lives as has Google and Wikipedia.
And he has claimed that it will always be a free service. Which is always a big plus!