13 March 2009 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant

Wolfram | Alpha – Will it provide the answers?

There is a new search engine being launched in May - Wolfram|Alpha. Not catchy but it doesn't need to be if it can do what they say. . .

There's always something new happening in search and it's often difficult to distinguish what is hype and what is the good stuff. We constantly see new functionality from established search engines or a new upstart trying to break Google's stranglehold.

Cuil was the biggest hype and biggest disappointment of 2008, Powerset also grabbed loads of headlines and may still appear in another Microsoft guise. Most recently Twitter Search has been talked about as the first real-time and best user generated search engine. This week there have been mumblings within the search community about a new search engine that plans to do something a little different. If it fulfils its promises, we could have an excellent alternative for certain types of search queries. It has the hallmarks of being good stuff rather than hype. For a start, there's not been that much hype - yet.

Wolfram|Alpha is the not-very-catchily-titled brain child of Stephen Wolfram- the physicist who changed the world of mathematical research with his computational software program, Mathematica. He's acclaimed as something of a mathematical genius in his field - a good start for someone getting involved in building a search engine.

In 2002 he published a book called a New Kind of Science which is a study of computational systems in which he argues that as well as the usual engineering and mathematical methods of approaching computation, a new "systematic, empirical investigation of computational systems for their own sake" should be used. It doesn't sound like holiday reading but at least it boosts his credentials further as someone who might create a groundbreaking search tool.

Here's the bit you really want to know about. The premise behind Wolfram Research's search is that it will be able to give you the answer to any question, provided an answer exists. That sounds amazing provided you can stop thinking about Ask Jeeves for a minute. We're talking Star Trek computer without the unforgiving voice.

Current search engines can provide results for exact words or phrases and that's about it - that's complex enough. They don't make any effort to figure out meaning or even implied relationships between words. The semantic web (introducing tagging to aid understanding) has been spoken about for some time. Yahoo! seems keen but Google isn't. Wolfram seems to think the answer is to instead algorithmically decipher meaning from an indexed database of information. That's what's really exciting about this project.

Wolfram|Alpha isn't setting out to answer questions using a database of preset Q&As or, Jeeves style, just giving regular search results. You will be able to type in a factual question and Wolfram|Alpha will have a shot at answering it based on an understanding of your question and information it has gleaned from the web. Okay, so there's a ton of contradictory information on the web, that could present problems but perhaps not as bad as you might think - the search engine crawler can be tweaked to only use authoritative sources of information. The biggest problem is building a machine that can understand the complexities of a question presented by a human.

According to his blog, Stephen Wolfram had always thought such a machine would be possible at some stage then one day he realised that he had the necessary ingredients to try it himself. He said:

"With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules."

This project is undoubtedly ambitious and I don't expect for one moment that it will be brilliant on release, such is the quantum leap from regular search to what is being attempted. If it can show even a glimmer of hope that such a machine can function in future it will be a success.

Wolfram|Alpha is due to be released in May. We hope to have a sneak peak before then and will let you know if it lives up to expectations.

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