Wolfram|Alpha launching today and what it means for Google and search

Wolfram|Alpha knowledge search engine is set to launch online today, May 15, with a live webcast beginning at 7pm CST. A lot of hype has been made around this new project by the iconic Stephen Wolfram and his team most widely known for their brilliant Mathematica package and online math encyclopedia. We have seen a lot of attempts to create a Google killer, the last being the unfortunate Cuil. But Wolfram|Alpha is anything but a search engine — it’s not a Google killer, it’s the future.

The approach to information research between Worlfram and Google is completely different. While Google tries to index as much content as it can, rank it by relevance and answer any query it gets, it also moves the actual answer seeking onto the user. It especially shows when you are doing your studies and looking for particular solutions to specific problems — Google is really helpless at putting correct links right before you. Unfortunately, there was no other option than Google, so we end up in digging through at least 5 pages of results to find the thing we are seeking.

Wolfram|Alpha on the other hand will give you a concrete answer — if it knows it. Otherwise it will tell you it doesn’t know what you want. Now, until today this behavior was considered wrong. We assumed whatever we ask, we’ll get an answer. And it would be best if the service could read our minds even with completely ridiculous questions like why blue is green. My point is, maybe it’s time for specific tools, like Wolfram|Alpha, to emerge and say that Google approach is not the Holy Grail of search?

What I learned from the recent screencast demoing Wolfram|Alpha is that never before we had a tool that would let us manipulate data in such flexible way. For example, we can easily find a good name for our baby analyzing how different names distribute over past few years. Or check how different countries develop in relation to each other. We can easily compute mathematical equations, monitor changes in different areas like economy, weather, politics and society. This may sound boring for all who use Google to find new stacks of porn, jokes and funny stuff (viva la 4chan!), but for serious business Google results were too raw to use, even with the amazing set of APIs (oh I’d like to get my hands on Alpha API) .

In my opinion we just observe a true beginning of the end of its holiness Google search engine. Yes, it has changed the Web as we know it, yes, it will still be number one, and yes, it should not try to be different — we love it for simplicity. But we should acknowledge that Web search is evolving, and Wolfram|Alpha showed that there’s enormous amount of space for development. But we should also remember it will all break down to a simple thing of asking the proper questions.