Search Results for: wolfram

ZDNet’s Larry Digman suspects Google’s Sergey Brin is looking over his shoulder at the start-up Wolfram Alpha.

Picking through Brin’s annual “Founders’ Letter” Digman found this interesting little aside:

I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that “understands” more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google’s systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be.

I tend to agree that this is a reference to Wolfram Alpha, but I don’t think it suggests Google is concerned about the start-up’s claims. On the contrary, it appears this one statement sends a number of strong messages:

Let me ask you something. Do you think we need Wolfram Alpha?

I know that’s the equivalent of asking someone circa 1999 “do you think we need Google?” but I’m just not sure what role the much anticipated search engine will fill.

Oh, excuse me. It’s not a search engine. It’s a “computational knowledge engine.”

The NYT tells us that Stephen Wolfram–Alpha’s creator–is “not keen” on the comparison with Google. But, even if it’s not a true search engine, will the average web user find value in Wolfram Alpha?

Consider some of the examples given to demonstrate the potential of Wolfram Alpha:

Type in “Pluto” and Alpha calculates the dwarf planet’s distance from Earth at that very instant…If you type “LDL 120,” it will return a graph showing the distribution of cholesterol levels among the United States population.

By David Lindop

It’s coming up to a year since I interviewed someone over at Hakia.com, a semantic, natural language based search engine. Now it seems another contender to the throne is making considerable noise in Britain where London-born scientist Stephen Wolfram believes he has set the foundation for a more intelligent search engine coined Wolfram|Alpha.

Wolfram aims to unveil the new search engine to the public in two months’ time, and has so far tantalised us with claims “that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make [Wolfram|Alpha] work.”

Whenever a new start-up makes bold claims about its search technology, my first question is usually: what’s to stop Google from building the exact same thing?

For the benefit of all future search engines, Google has kindly proved my point by practically undermining the first public demo of Wolfram Alpha with the announcement of its own structured data search.

Just how much of a threat is this Google announcement to Wolfram Alpha’s plans? Enough of a threat that TechCrunch received a screenshot that attempts to show how Google’s data just doesn’t stack up.

OK, so Wolfram Alpha’s search data does look prettier in this example. But, here are the challenges the start-up faces:

1. What the heck is a Wolfram Alpha? I hope they re-brand.