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The Search engine that wasn't

Posted on 12th June 2009 at 1:37 pm by Rik Stewart

Wolfram|Alpha has launched but has turned out not to be what a lot of people expected.

Wolfram|Alpha has launched but has turned out not to be what a lot of people expected. It is interesting that early mentions of it online more or less ignored, or possibly misunderstood, the fact that Wolfram|Alpha was never intended to be a search engine in the sense of what the term has come to mean.

Going back to the early mentions of Wolfram|Alpha, I blogged about the Guardian article British search engine 'could rival Google' ("A British physicist has revealed his plan to launch a new internet search engine so powerful that one expert has suggested it "could be as important as Google"), there was also "British scientist takes on Google with Wolfram Alpha" from the ITPRO site and Wolfram Alpha To Challenge Google? from Search Engine Land. We also mentioned the debut in our newsletter.


What Wolfram|Alpha is, is what it says on its home page: a "Computational knowledge engine". Other definitions that spring to mind when looking at it are "The ultimate homework tool" and "Wikipedia without the chaff", although Wolfram|Alpha tips its hat to Wikipedia by displaying results in a side bar for some searches. What Wolfram|Alpha does well is to present information on a given search term although, in my opinion, you seem to get more information if the term is related to Maths, which would tie in with the fact that Wolfram|Alpha is "Computed by Wolfram Mathematica".

Like many other internet startups, Wolfram|Alpha has attracted a large amount of interest early on, but this has rapidly trailed off, as can be clearly seen by a graph on Alexa.

   

File under: wolfram alpha

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