A New Kind of Search Engine ( Wolframalpha)

Well the word search has become so synonymous with google that people do not seem to be paying attention to new search engines. And why not? Anything searchable can be found on google. It is a one stop shop for all your worries. But the fast changing field of computers is such that new companies and new ideas find success and oblivion in the blink of an eye. The stalwarts of yesteryears which couldn't keep pace can now only be found in books. The economic history of the world is bloodied by the Dot Com Bust. And instead of settling in some kind equilibrium, the technology world seems to be in an order of chaos. New ideas keep finding money and audience. Just when everyone thought that orkut was here to stay, Facebook came along and swept other(not so lucky) social networking sites away. And when people thought that blogging as a feature was a permanent fixture on the digital world of internet, twitter in form of microblogging, started causing ripples. What if the site has yet to make a single dime, it is already valued at at a billion dollars, and has successfully raised $100 million to continue its operations. When people thought traditional media sites would gain additional revenue from internet sites, digital citizens started flocking to user generated contents and sites. Citizen journalism, though limited in scope, started becoming a buzzword.

The point is one never knows what is going to be successful tomorrow. So it was a pleasant surprise when i came across the search engine "wolframalpha.com". Now supposedly this is a pet project of UK scientist Stephen Wolfram, who created a new computer language called mathematica, and wrote a 1200 odd page book called "A New Kind of Science". Using the same principles, he and his fellow mates have launched this search engine. Now what's so different about this search, You may very well ask? Everything!! is my answer. It, for one, does not return to you the pointers to the pages containing your answer, but it rather calculates the answer itself and returns it you. Now by its very definition, "Computational Search Engine", it has a narrow field. It can not understand all your questions ( for there is a supercomputer acting as a brain and not another human ); but if you ask questions in it's own language you will be surprised at the answers it throws at you.

In their own words, "Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and grid Mathematica."

Now for some results:
I searched with query Google Microsoft and the result was-




All the comparision is made and presented beautifully. So i wanted to search for my city Mumbai. Here is the result :


Not to be outdone, i thought i would play with it some more. So off i went with the search for " God"

So the most hilarious part was when i asked the question " does god exist" Pat came the reply-


And i havn't even started at the tip of the iceberg. You can throw at it any mathematical equation, gene question, biology, geography etc and you would get an answer. Oh you should be forgiving as well, for it is hardly five months old. And it is a work in progress. Just think of it's potential a few years away from now. Ask any question, in any way and you shall have the answer.Tremendous!

It is in no way a threat to google, for one needs to see the pages about the search item also. It can be complementary to the google search. It is most likely to be the playground for students, researchers, scientists for now. It's biggest plus point is that it has put a supercomputer at everyone's disposal. You want anything to be computed, just go to the site and search (What wolfram ?) it. [ Too bad they couldn't come up with some nerdy name for the site. ] This project if successful, will be the dawn of new era for search engines and for humans. IF SUCCESSFUL!!!