After much fanfare the search engine Wolfram Alpha went live this month and for those that have had a look it may or may not be what they were expecting.
Having read the many stories about how it was going to be a possible Google killer, I was keen to have a look at what it had to offer. Preceding its release there was a lot of talk about the previous work of Wolfram Alpha’s creator Steven Wolfram, the computational software Mathematica and how it would work within the search engine.
The design looked good, lots of white and one search box in the Google manner but that is where the similarities ended. Where it was originally touted as a search engine, it’s an engine that provides answers - although academics and techies will call it a computational knowledge engine.
Wanting to test it out, I put a few questions to Wolfram Alpha, questions that I already knew the answer to just to see how it would go. Confusing would be the word. Much of the time Wolfram Alpha was unsure what to do with my input, and when it did the answers were not quite what I was expecting.
Enter Google into the search box and it will give you a list of all the company’s financial details and not much else, although it does provide a web link to find Google. It seems as though Wolfram Alpha is at its best in these early stages when dealing with numbers and not necessarily words.
Entering my hometown Brighton leads it to only reveal the population, local time and height above sea level, which is 79ft in case you were wondering (not sure how that works with the beach, but there you go!). It also offers a link to Wikipedia and Google where more information can be found. If this is to be the normal output, there seems little point in even entertaining Wolfram Alpha when there are many easier options for visiting the same sites.
Whether Wolfram Alpha will appeal to the general population outside of science and maths-based people remains to be seen. This will depend on what the aim of the site is, to make money or just to provide lots of answers to sums. If everyday people can’t answer the questions they input they will stop using it quickly and this will not attract the advertisers it needs to prosper.
