WolframAlpha Launches, Delivers On Promise

WolframAlpha computational knowledge database search engine

And the new WolframAlpha computational knowledge database is just that: a database. Unlike Google's search engine, which provides a long list of search results that may or may not be relevant, WolframAlpha is a stripped-down, bare-bones operation.

For example, entering "James Dean" into the WolframAlpha computational knowledge database yields the basic facts about the actor's life: full name, date of birth, place of birth and age he died. A time line also appears below those basic facts, illuminating the years James Dean lived.

A query in WolframAlpha about "Chicago" returns a set of facts about the city. The city population and metro area population are the first results returned; local time and weather are provided; and the city is plotted on a map.

But when a search is conducted on something a bit more subjective, the results don't always appear.

Interested in what the WolframAlpha search engine might say about "bloggers" yielded a somewhat disappointing result. The first results are Blogger as a Web domain. By selecting the "use as a word" option, the search engine result is just as sparse: "noun; a person who keeps and updates a blog."

When the computational knowledge database is overwhelmed by traffic, WolframAlpha gives a nod to the science fiction geeks around the world, serving up an image of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The accompanying text says: "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

While some users might be disappointed by the lack of Google-like search results, WolframAlpha was never intended to provide hundreds of pages of search results.

Stephen Wolfram, the brains behind Mathematica and A New Kind Of Science and the architect of the WolframAlpha computational knowledge database, said from the beginning that his search engine was designed to answer specific questions, using the accumulated knowledge of the Web to provide the best possible results.

"Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they'd quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things," wrote Wolfram on his blog. "And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.

"But it didn't work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that."

To that end, the WolframAlpha computational knowledge database delivers exactly on what it promised. Now, it's up to individual users to find the applications of the search engine that best fit them going forward.