Wolfram Alpha

Tuesday, 19 May, 2009

Wolfram’s Alpha has made quite a big splash on the search engine scene and looks likely to redefine the whole search business. As with Google, the interface is minimalist belying what’s going on in the background and it doesn’t brand itself as a search engine, but rather a “computational knowledge engine.” And whtat is really the lead to take here; in the same way that Ask Jeeves tries to understand your question so too does Alpha. Except that instead of leading you to pages with the answer, it tries to answer the question itself using (not surprisingly!) some clever mathematics and a large array of source data.

So type in life expectancy and you will get back a page rich in detail showing you life expectancy around the world, a histogram and rank, all of which can be download as a PDF that is generated on the fly. This is very impressive and extends to a whole variety of subject areas all of which are worth exploring. So, for example, you can directly input equations for solving or graphing. On the geography side, you can geocode points, get elevations or produce maps.

It sounds like a panacea which it isn’t. For starters it’s quite slow at the moment, probably because of the publicity, however this has had the effect of repeatably killing (completely!) Firefox. Also, the results are heavily US centric with far less data available at national and sub-national levels outside the US. This is to be expected and something that will no doubt be worked upon. Each results page also has a “source” section; if you creating a “knowledge mashup” the data sources that are being mashed need to be far more explicitly referred to. To be fair there is a note stating that this can be requested, however if I ask for elevation kingston upon thames it would be nice to know where that information has come from. The effect upon derived/computed products can obviously be profound. This is a hugely rich site and I know will require a fair bit of time to learn how to fully utilise it. V2 will be interesting!