The new Wolfram Alpha search box
When I first heard of Wolfram Alpha; I was a little bit shocked that such a good company would want to take on the mighty Google at their own game. But after further investigation it seems that Stephen Wolfram might actually be on to something. The idea of Wolfram Alpha is not to directly compete against Google in the search engine wars, but to create its own niche in the market. The idea behind Wolfram Alpha is to return coherent, concise information regarding factual questions. So, if I wanted to know information regarding “internet users in Europe” I would type that into the search box, and Wolfram Alpha would then collate all the information and then display it to the user in a nice, coherent manner.
Search results from Wolfram Alpha
Personally I think that this approach to data mining is great. It would allow more people to access information which would be of interest to them. Now, I’m not talking to hardened surfies like the people that are probably reading this, but to the kids working on school projects, the grandparents and the surfing newbies. I really like the method that Wolfram Alpha is using to mine the data. All you need to do is to ask the search engine a question – a little bit like “Ask Jeeves” back in the day, but with far better results. The image shows the results from the “internet users in Europe” question. Now, while I have a lot of admiration for what Stephen Wolfram is trying to do, I do have some reservations about how the hardened surfie community will take to it. I can imagine that those people, like me, who feel quite at home using boolean operators and keywords to filter down search results to the information they want, feeling a little lost and frustrated with the AI behind Wolfram Alpha. I can just see me now – sitting there shouting at the screen – “I don’t care about what you think I want!! I want you to give me what I want!!”
Maybe I’m jumping the gun a little here, but I get the impression that obtaining the exact information you want might be a little quicker for hardened surfies using the good old Google+Boolean method. But, I must admit, if Wolfram Alpha can help those people who currently struggle to find information on the web, then big-ups to them.
In addition to the nice data mining, there are also the usual mathematical functions which you would expect from a Wolfram product. In a similar manner to Wolfram Integrals you can just type in a mathematical equation and ask it to integrate it – BAM – out comes the results. Sweet functionality for all those high school / college students out there struggling with their calculus assignments 
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Wolfram Alpha can integrate functions and show associated graphs etc – sweet
This part of Wolfram Alpha has a little bit more functionality than the current integrals implementation, with the added graphs and other associated information coming from the data mining capabilities of Wolfram Alpha.
To be honest, I’m quite pumped about this. I will be interested to have a good play with the different functions when it gets released towards the end of May 2009. For now I can only speculate and watch the demo given by Stephen Wolfram himself. Hit up the link and take a look for yourself
