A Look At the Wolfram Alpha "Search Engine"

An anonymous reader points out a ReadWriteWeb piece on an hour-long demo of Wolfram|Alpha (which we discussed at its announcement). Stephen Wolfram does not like to call it a "search engine," preferring instead the term "computational knowledge engine." It will open to the public in May. "The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next 'Google killer' from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype — though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a 'Google killer.' According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information."

Comments

This could work.

[Max Romantschuk]

It seems they are not trying to index the web, nor trying to replace Google.

Instead they are trying to compute knowledge-worthy data from a small subset of the web using natural language algorithms.

Queries like "What is the melting point of iron?" are processed and answered, instead of just trying to score pages based on keywords.

This could really work.