Wolfram Alpha has a bit of all of these elements working for it, though it’s significantly different than other recent attempts to dethrone Google, such as Cuil, which fell flat on its face on launch day, or Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft before ever really getting a chance to prove itself as a commercially viable product.
The first key thing to be aware of with Wolfram Alpha – the project of Stephen Wolfram, a noted physicist and mathematician – is that it’s not a search engine in the traditional sense. Its goal isn’t to index the Web and direct you to Web pages quickly, but rather, to make computations based on a rich database of historical knowledge.
What It Does
In checking out the private preview this week (the site is expected to launch later this month), the first question to come to mind was when exactly would I use this as opposed to Google? Most of my searches are navigational – I’m either looking for a specific type of website (travel, tickets, etc.), or researching a story that I’m working on for Mashable.
To answer this question, Wolfram Alpha has an “examples” section with about two dozen different sample uses of its technology. Some of these examples are really heady, academic stuff – like the calculus you probably don’t remember from college.
Others are more practical, like entering in “San Francisco to Tokyo” and getting data on how many miles apart they are, the projected flight path, and current local times. Meanwhile, if you ever wanted to know what time the sun rose and set on the day you were born, type in your birthday and Wolfram Alpha will tell you (and also let me know that I’m approaching my 10,000th day on earth!).
What It Doesn’t Do
While that is pretty cool, it’s not exactly something I’d need to use every day, nor something I could easily explain to typical Web users. Additionally, when trying more Google-like searches, like trying to find a Las Vegas hotel room, there doesn’t seem to be much that Wolfram Alpha can do to help. But, that also doesn’t really seem to be the point of Wolfram Alpha – at least for now.
Where It Fits
The real strength and power of Wolfram Alpha does seem to be for the academic and research community, where the company’s founder has been innovating for more than two decades. How well it works will ultimately come down to its ability to interpret user inputs (i.e. - the examples are impressive, but how well will it respond to the queries of real users?), and its ability to grow its database to perform more everyday tasks.