by Ben
26. May 2009 17:53
We recently spoke of a few up-and-coming search engines, perhaps to rival Google’s dominance of search. Since then we’ve seen the emergence of a major new player in the market, Wolfram Alpha.
Here at atom42, we’re fascinated by new search engines and how their products can make searching easier and offer an alternative approach. Although many are hailing Wolfram Alpha as the Google killer, after a little use it becomes apparent that they do quite different jobs.
For example, if you wanted to find a pizza restaurant in Covent Garden, London, Google returns a list and a map of restaurants where you can get a pizza in the area. However, with the same query, Wolfram Alpha returns a message expressing that it ‘isn’t sure what to do with your input’.
Try a search simply for ‘pizza’, and you get the full nutritional breakdown of a pizza – which is much harder to find, and likely to be subjective, in Google (and at an alleged 1280 calories for a pepperoni pizza, it’s something I won’t be eating much of in the future!).
Wolfram Alpha has been developed by the mathematician Stephen Wolfram, famous for his software Mathematica. With this in mind, it’s not surprising his long term goal is ‘to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone’.
Wolfram Alpha contains 10+ trillion pieces of data, and boasts that it has the ‘power and flexibility to support ready extension’ – as well as promoting that the website is really only the start of this ambitious project.
It’s clear that Wolfram Alpha’s strength lies in statistics, and there’s plenty of exciting prospects for the future of the search engine – but if you want to find pizza restaurants in London we suggest you stick with Google - for now.
