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More Stuff About Wolfram Alpha

About 10 days ago I posted about Wolfram Alpha, the best dang search engine I know nothing about. I’m still in the dark — its official launch is a week from today — but there have been more articles about it in the meantime:

• Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land calls Wolfram Alpha “impressive” and a “new search paradigm”, but not a “Google-Killer“. He focuses on how Wolfram differs from Google — it gets data directly from providers (rather than by indexing it) and verifies and tags it using 150 human “curators”. Sullivan talks about the “Holy Grail” aspect of Wolfram: “the ability to look inside data sources that can’t easily be crawled and provide answers from them. Wolfram Alpha succeeds because unlike with those past attempts, it has produced its own centralized repository of these answers and stats.” He finishes by asking whether your basic garden variety searcher will ever use Wolfram: “For reasons I’ve never seen fully researched or explained, people simply do not go to specialty search tools in mass numbers.”

• The ReadWriteWeb has “mixed emotions” about Wolfram, but feels it’s “going to be a great tool for students, engineers, and academics — and anybody who needs data quickly and knows how to interpret it.” The article lists the queries that worked (the wingspan of a B-29 Superfortress, how many pharmacists there are in the U.S. and their median wage, or how much money “The Wrath of Khan” made at the box office) and those that didn’t (unemployment data for U.S. cities, who was the German chancellor in 1984, or a history of  World War I or II).

• Finally, the NY Times focuses on the business of running Wolfram: “If successful, WolframAlpha has the potential to become a large business opportunity. For now, Mr. Wolfram said he plans to offer advertising and other forms of sponsorship on the site, and perhaps offer premium versions of the service for researchers. And somewhat coyly, he said he has discussed potential partnerships with the ‘obvious people,’ including search engine companies. ‘We are actively pursuing interesting relationships,’ he said. Representatives for Google and Yahoo declined to discuss WolframAlpha.”

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on May 11, 2009 (boomark / email).