Wolfram Alpha: A First Look

Lofty claims have been made about Wolfram Alpha, a self-styled "computational knowledge engine" launched recently. Web User's News Editor Ben Camm-Jones takes a look at Wolfram Alpha to see if the claims stand up.

Though its creators deny that Wolfram Alpha is a search engine, they themselves have said that it could be "as important to the web as Google".

Like Google, Wolfram Alpha is also a tool that is intended to let you find information and answers to questions on the web. But let's put aside the inevitable comparisons to Google for a moment and examine how Wolfram Alpha differs to other search services.

Dr Stephen Wolfram, the man behind Wolfram Alpha, said prior to the launch that it would work out answers to your queries "on the fly" and that potentially any question could be answered with the information at its disposal.

Wolfram Alpha search engine launches

Complex algorithms allow Wolfram Alpha to gather data from several sources to give you the answers you are looking for. The intention is that the interface is very basic and you can simply ask a question, to which Wolfram Alpha will present you with an answer. Simple.

What Wolfram Alpha doesn't do is provide you with a list of links to web pages containing keywords that you have entered. Instead, it attempts to answer your query by presenting information to you all in the same place - the results page.

Wolfram has previously said that searchers would be able to use "natural language" to get answers to their queries rather than having to use a specially adapted 'search language' - using quotation marks, omitting words such as 'and' or 'the' and so on - though when we entered the grammatically correct query 'what is today's date?' it didn't understand and suggested we ask 'what is today date' instead.

However, Wolfram Alpha is intended to answer far more complex questions than that. Anyone with an interest in areas such as data analysis, applied mathematics or engineering should be able to enter formulae and find answers to their queries easily, its creators say.

Many of our searches, though, came up against brick walls - the message "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input" came up frequently. Though it does make suggestions for parts of the phrase it recognises, which are often helpful, it isn't as seamless an experience as we were promised.

Watch a demonstration of Wolfram Alpha

Of course, we wouldn't expect anything to work perfectly this soon after launching. And when it does work, the information is clearly presented and it often serves up interesting nuggets that you weren't even looking for but are useful nonetheless.

Overall, there is room for improvement but enough initial promise to suggest that it could become an important tool in any surfers' armoury. Indeed, if you use the web regularly to find particular pieces of information for research tasks then you may well find yourself using it much more often than you do other search engines.

However, it is unlikely to replace Google - Wolfram Alpha is designed to answer specific queries, whereas there are a number of reasons we might use a traditional search engine, such as to find news reports or photographs or a website to help us kill time or reach out to other people on the web.