What is Wolfram|Alpha

There was a lot of hype leading up to the launch of Wolfram|Alpha and a flurry of coverage following its launch on May 17th. In reading some of the coverage, I think there is a lot of overhype and hate which can be cleared up with one fact: Wolfram|Alpha is not a new web search engine.

In fact, the makers don’t even refer to it as any sort of search engine, web or otherwise. They describe it as a “computational knowledge engine”. But what does that mean?

First and foremost, it means they aren’t trying to take down Google. What Wolfram|Alpha is trying to do is to map knowledge—all of it. And in the process they provide a service which lets people query that knowledge and compute it in whatever manner they need—for free.

I was in Edmonton over the weekend and was asked how the size of Edmonton compared to the size of Saskatoon. Of course, I made a humourous remark about Saskatoon fitting nicely into West Edmonton Mall. (Ok, you caught me. It wasn’t that humourous). What I could have done was gone to Google, searched “population Saskatoon”, memorized the number, then searched for “population Edmonton” and then compared the two in my head. It’s a bit cumbersome and provides limited results but it’s doable.

With Wolfram|Alpha, I can search “Saskatoon vs Edmonton” and be presented with data and graphs showing how the two match up in population; how far apart they are; how long a flight between the two cities would take; what the current local times are and the approximate elevation of the two cities—and it’s all on one page. Sure, it’s missing data like geographic size, economics, nationalities and more—but it’s still a step up.

That’s one tiny example of the knowledge Wolfram|Alpha looks to map. From figures and formulas to facts and football, they’re looking to map as much knowledge as they can. If you watch their Overview video, you will undoubtedly be impressed. But don’t crown them the new wonder child just yet.

While the natural language parser is excellent, there are some seemingly simple queries that leave it perplexed. I can search for my birthday and find out what phase the moon was in on that day, but I can’t find out who was the Prime Minister of Canada on the day I was born. Instead, I’m told “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”

Does that mean I phrased my query wrong? Or that they don’t have all the Prime Ministers of Canada in their system yet? I like to think that a good way to judge a service–online or otherwise–is to see how it handles failure. Wolfram|Alpha simply rolls over and plays dead.

This is an initial release and they certainly get an A+ for their efforts and vision, but they have a long way to go to become the Google of knowledge. And they better move fast, because Google is interested in mapping more than just the web.

Related Links
Wolfram|Alpha’s Surprising Terms of Service
Wolfram|Alpha and Google Face Off
Wolfram|Alpha Fails the Cool Test