Wolfram Alpha Looks To Expand Field Of Knowledge

The physicist behind the Wolfram Alpha search engine said Thursday his team is working to ensure its software can respond to questions across a much broader field of knowledge than it currently can.
##CONTINUE##
Stephen Wolfram said his "computational knowledge engine" is increasingly becoming more sophisticated and has access to a growing number of data sources so that it can provide answers to a much wider range of financial, historical, political and socioeconomic questions posed by users.

The push to expand its scope of knowledge will help correct a key weakness of Wolfram Alpha, which some have speculated could one day challenge search leader Google Inc. (GOOG)

Google accounts for a 64% share of U.S. searches and some have argued that it is unlikely any rival will be able to challenge its market dominance. But that hasn't stopped others from trying. Earlier this week, software giant Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) launched its revamped search engine, dubbed Bing, in a bid to drive advertising revenue growth.

Wolfram Alpha's launch last month was marred by technical glitches and widespread disappointment that the engine was too focused on scientific data to appeal to the general audience that uses Google.

For example, it can spit out the boiling point of magnesium (1,994 degrees Fahrenheit) or estimate the number of stars in the observable universe (70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 give or take a few), but it doesn't know how many times the New England Patriots have played in the Super Bowl.

Wolfram, founder of Champaign, Ill.-based Wolfram Research Inc., the company behind the new software, said in a Webcast on Thursday that his team was trying to understand why the knowledge engine hasn't been able to answer some queries and to figure out how to make it work better.

"It has humans in the loop trying to make it smarter," he said. "We're not going to let Wolfram Alpha loose to let it learn on its own. Too many things can go wrong that way."

Wolfram also said his team is tapping additional databases containing financial information, historical affairs, real estate trends, weather data, real-time flight tracking, obituaries and local data. He said users have requested more legal and bibliographic information.

Wolfram again downplayed suggestions his software was a rival to traditional search engines from Google, Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) or Microsoft. He noted that Wolfram Alpha doesn't provide users with relevant Web links like most search engines do, but rather crunches data from a series of databases and provides answers to questions users have asked.

Wolfram also said the company was working to develop premium subscription services, such as allowing corporations to crunch their data with Wolfram Alpha's software. He added that the company would continue to make a casual version widely available for free.

Google declined to comment.

-----------------------------
BY Scott Morrison
Source：The Wall Street Journal

Copyright ©2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Wolfram Alpha : 5 Things You Need To Know

Much has been said about Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge engine that many claim could soon rival Google for search supremacy.
##CONTINUE##
But the service does not market itself as either a search engine or a rival to Google, leaving this task to the online tech community who have been too keen to bring forward other alternatives to Google.

Wolfram Alpha, which looks like a cross between a traditional search engine and a service like Wikipedia. It doesn't try to be a Jack of all trade, preferring to be best at what it does.

Here are five things you should know about the online service which, unlike Twine, Cuil or Hakia, make Wolfram Alpha an excellent complement to Google.

(1) Wolfram Alpha is a software developer first
Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge engine, is a subset of Wolfram Web resource. The company behind it is better known inside the scientific community as the maker of Mathematica, a £2035 application that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris. It is billed as the "World's Most Powerful Global Computing Environment". It is therefore not a surprise that Wolfram Alpha itself is built primarily using Mathematica; it contains 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code.

(2) Wolfram Alpha offers its APIs to developers and then some..
The online service allows you to connect any website or application to its technology through a custom set of API. Furthermore, developers can call the Mathematica engine directly or create their own customised web interface using webMathematica. But that's not all, Wolfram Alpha will be available in a professional version which will allow data to be downloaded or uploaded (XML, CSV, Images etc) and allow different visualisation formats. There is also the possibility for enterprises to get customised installations of Wolfram Alpha.

(3) There are already ads on the site
Lenovo and Scottrade are two early (only?) sponsors for Wolfram Alpha which according to the company get access to a unique audience as well as brand enhancement opportunities. That's only part of the equation though as Wolfram Alpha is also seeking to pioneer a new generation of targeted transactional advertising model.

(4) The human is definitely the weakest link
Wolfram Alpha is not for everyone. There are many instances where you will be either greeted by the “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” or when Wolfram Alpha will automatically substitute your search word and produce a result. Trying to "google yourself" will not necessarily bring up. There are a few things that may help though; be more specific, objective and query about things in the public domain.

(5) Wolfram Alpha's homepage is 9 times heavier than Google's
Wolfram Alpha's homepage weighs a staggering 213KB the last time we checked, 9 times more than Google's 26KB. The reason why Google succeeded has always been because it was faster and whatever way you look at it, a 26KB page will show up faster than a 213KB one. Furthermore, there are a number of idiosyncrasies like its propensity to depend too much on Javascript which can harm your sanity (and make your browser as slow as a three-legged turtle).

-----------------------------
BY Désiré Athow
Source：ITProPortal

Désiré Athow is the Content Editor of ITProPortal.com and has been writing technology articles for nearly a decade. You can follow him on Twitter.

© Net Communities and respective partners where appropriate.

Wolfram|Alpha Claims Authorship Rights For Machines

While many observers have noted that Wolfram|Alpha is not like Google, the distinction between the two services is perhaps most apparent in their Terms of Service.
##CONTINUE##
Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Terms of Service don't demand much other than lawful behavior. Wolfram|Alpha on the other hand makes some rather surprising demands, as noted in a discussion on Groklaw.

"The free Wolfram|Alpha service is available for ad hoc, personal, non-commercial use only," Wolfram Research's Terms of Use state.

While Wolfram Research makes some allowance for occasional professional use and posting Wolfram|Alpha results in blogs, anyone using the service regularly in a professional capacity has to seek a license.

Wolfram Research also demands that users attribute results produced by using Wolfram|Alpha to the company.

"Failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram|Alpha is not only a violation of these terms, but may also constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law," the Terms of Use state. "Attribution is something we expect you to give us in exchange for us having provided you with a high-quality free service."

That's a puzzling claim given that Wolfram|Alpha is supposed to compute factual answers and facts cannot be copyrighted.

What's more, plagiarism applies to copying another author's work without attribution, but Wolfram|Alpha is a set of machines that perform calculations.

It's as if Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) asserted that data generated through the use of Excel and not attributed to the company's software represents plagiarism or a violation of copyright law.

While Wolfram Research may be intending its Terms of Use for academic publications, where rigorous citation standards are appropriate, the company's instance on so many restrictions guarantees that Wolfram|Alpha will remain a niche research tool.

-----------------------------
BY Thomas Claburn
Source：InformationWeek

Copyright © 2009 United Business Media LLC, All rights reserved.

New Search Service Has Techies Talking

A small start-up is causing a stir in the technology world with a highly anticipated new Internet-search service that some speculate could eventually challenge Google Inc.
##CONTINUE##
Wolfram Research Inc., the firm behind the new software, known as Wolfram Alpha, prefers to call the technology a "computational knowledge engine," rather than a search engine. It doesn't search the Web for facts, as Google and most other search engines do.

Instead it mines limited databases compiled by the Wolfram Alpha team, then performs computations on those facts, yielding original data, rather than links to existing Web pages.

"We're trying to do something which is emulating the way that an expert would actually answer a question," says Stephen Wolfram, a physicist and founder of the Champagne, Ill., company.

Entering a city, for example, displays information such as its population, the local time, its location on a map, nearby cities and a link to its Wikipedia entry. The home page of Wolfram Alpha also invites visitors to type in mathematical problems or plain-English questions, in addition to search terms.

The service launched Friday, and the company continued to tweak the site over the weekend. By Monday afternoon, the site had received about 22.7 million queries from users, with three out of four labeled as returning satisfactory results, Mr. Wolfram said. "That means we have about a 5.7 million-item to-do list."

He is also sifting through some 22,500 feedback comments that the development team received.

Some reviewers have called Wolfram Alpha too technical for a lay audience, while others challenge the idea that it would compete with Google, since Wolfram Alpha seeks to answer questions on its site, rather than provide links to other sites.

Google declined to comment on Wolfram Alpha specifically but said in a statement: "We welcome competition that helps deliver useful information to users and expands user choice."

Wolfram Alpha and Google have different functions, Mr. Wolfram said. "It's now possible to take a decent chunk of the world's knowledge and make it computable. That's a different branch from what Google's doing."

-----------------------------
BY ANDREW LAVALLEE
Source：The Wall Street Journal

Write to Andrew LaVallee at andrew.lavallee@wsj.com

Copyright ©2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

WolframAlpha - should Google be quaking in its boots?

I have spent the weekend playing around with the new search engine project WolframAlpha.
##CONTINUE##
After months of preview hype, the new "computational knowledge engine" had a rolling launch on Friday, accompanied by a couple of hiccups mostly to do with dealing with the amount of traffic heading its way, and the service launches officially to the public tomorrow.

Is it any good and will it fulfill the breathless talk of it being a Google Killer? The answers are emphatically yes and no.

The site itself is pleasingly clean and simple. One search box for your query. You enter the terms and click return.

If WolframAlpha (WA) has the data to compute an answer for you, the results are quick and impressive.

Type in "London San Francisco" you get the city population and the metro population for both, the distance between both cities, the flight time between them, a map, the local time in each city and the approximate elevations of each place. For example:

It is slick and looks good.

Another example - I typed in "position of International Space Station". This is what I got:

Underneath the simplicity, lies some serious computing power. This computation, by Wolfram's Mathematica software, requires differential equations for the motion of the craft in Earth's gravitational field. When I tried to do the same on Google, results pointed me to a NASA website but the orbital tracker was unavailable. I then got lost trying to find an alternative in the maze of pages.

This is WolframAlpha at its best. It takes serious scientific data and produces answers that simply don't exist as easily or as accessibly elsewhere. It can do calculus, regression analysis and gene coding.

In short it is the best calculator on the web and it is free for everyone to use. Scientists, engineers, and math fiends are going to flock to it, I am guessing.

But it will not threaten Google's position as the search engine of choice for most of the planet. Because for all its massive databases, it falls down when you get into anything cultural.

It will not tell you the best MP3 player to buy or where to look for one. It does not tell you the latest news on MPs and their expenses claims. It has massive holes in data - most of its coverage of people gives simply a birth date, birth place and a rather useless timeline.

"Muhammad Ali" brings up:

and that was it. No details of his fights or titles. No other biographical detail.

"Don Bradman" brings up: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

WA acknowledges these weaknesses with links to Wikipedia and to ordinary web searches with Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live from every result.

Admittedly this is early days for the service. Stephen Wolfram, the British-born scientist behind WA, has said that there is much work to do and many more databases to compile. He has 150 people working for him and it will take time.

But Google is already working to blunt the impact of WA. It is about to launch a spreadsheet feature Google Squared shortly, which in effect is a very populist version of WolframAlpha.

The existence of WolframAlpha points the way to a future of supercomputing power that should excite everyone, even if they do not end up using it. It is beginning to get at the sort of role that science fiction writers have always envisioned for computers ie HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But WA's "intelligence" is still severely limited.

What will I use WA for? I liked the basic financial information pages for companies which set out some nice graphs and fundamentals. For instance "Apple" returns a whole host of information that do not come with the simple Yahoo! finance pages such the daily returns versus the S&P 500:

Impressive. Economists will find WA increasingly useful, I suspect.

There are various downloads for your toolbar or widget add-ons if you want to put WA in your browser etc. Go here.

My favourite result so far is the one from the question "does God exist?"

-----------------------------
BY Mike Harvey
Source：TIMES ONLINE

“谷歌杀手”上线即被批 口号太响名不副实

被一些媒体鼓吹为“Google杀手”的搜索工具wolframalpha日前上线。不少人士在试用后发现，所谓的“Google杀手”原来是个功能十分有限的数据库搜索，“杀手”这一称谓可谓“闹了一个大笑话”。
##CONTINUE##
Wolframalpha号称用计算机“计算”出结果，和Google的网页搜索模式大不相同。不过根据搜索结果来看，Wolframalpha性能和Google不在一个档次上。

比如搜索“China”（中国），Wolframalpha列出中国的国名、面积、地图位置以及邻国，还有GDP等经济指标。

搜索“Sohu”，该搜索列出了搜狐公司的市值、收入、员工数量，以及股价变化曲线。

在搜索“Sina”，竟然称是伊朗的一个城市，和中国门户网站新浪无关。

分析人士表示，Wolframalpha口号喊得太响，使用效果甚至不如维基百科创始人威尔斯领导研发的维基搜索，因为实力不济，维基搜索已经关闭。

目前在英文网络搜索领域，已经形成Google、雅虎两强垄断格局，微软搜索因为技术性能欠佳，已经逐渐被挤出市场，据称正在测试一个代号“Kumo”的新搜索。

-----------------------------
文章出处：搜狐IT
作者：N/A

WolframAlpha: the next big thing in search?

When a free web service called WolframAlpha launches in the coming days, the general public will get to try a "computational knowledge engine" that has had technology insiders buzzing because of its oracle-like ability to spit out answers and make calculations.
##CONTINUE##
Which has a bigger gross domestic product, Spain or Canada? What was New York City's population in 1900? When did the sun rise in Los Angeles on November 15, 1973? How far is the moon right now? If I eat an apple and an orange, how much protein would I get?

WolframAlpha will tell you - without making you comb through links as a search engine would. It also will graphically illustrate answers when merited. So if you query "GDP Spain Canada" you'd see a chart indicating that Spain's economy was smaller than Canada's most of the time since 1970 and recently pulled ahead.

That's pretty clever.

Yet after testing the service for a few weeks, I think WolframAlpha is unlikely to become a household name - and not just because of the gauze-in-the-mouth logjam of two "f" sounds in the title. While WolframAlpha is brilliant at times and elegant in its display, there aren't many ways everyday web users would benefit from using it over other resources.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that I'm troubled by the potential for WolframAlpha. I fear the implications of an information butler that is considered so smart and so widely applicable that people turn to it without question, by default, whenever they want to know something.

What's that, you say? We already have such a service?

Well, for all the fears that Google is making us stupid by making it too easy to look up information, at least Google and its rivals enable the critical thinking that comes from scoping out multiple sources.

Unlike search engines that deliver links that match keywords in your query, WolframAlpha is more of a black box. If you have it perform a calculation, it gives you an answer, along with a small link for "source information." Open that and you'll generally be told the data was "curated" - found and verified - by the company behind WolframAlpha. In other words, "trust us."

The site does suggest ways to track down similar information from other sources, including government statistics, proprietary databases, almanacs and the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. To confirm WolframAlpha's data I went a suddenly old-fashioned route - through web searches on Google and Yahoo. I didn't find any errors, but taking that step made me wonder why I didn't just use Google or Yahoo to begin with.

WolframAlpha comes from Stephen Wolfram, 49, a British-born physics prodigy who earned a Caltech Ph.D. at age 20 and won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" at 21. Wolfram went on to focus on complexity theory, especially the idea that patterns in nature could emerge from simple rules, and founded Wolfram Research, which develops advanced math and analysis software called Mathematica.

Because Mathematica includes data "curated" by more than 100 Wolfram employees, over the years the company has built a wide knowledge base. Now WolframAlpha lets the wider world have a crack at it.

While the service is free, Wolfram envisions ads alongside certain query results. He might also offer paid versions with extra features.

The amount of data in the service is impressive. It can show the odds of lottery games in any state. By tapping birth stats and mortality data it estimates there are 2.8 million people named William alive in the U.S. today. It knows The Big Lebowski earned $US17 million at the box office.

But often WolframAlpha can be unacceptably nerdy.

When I sought the distance from Boston to Philadelphia, the site told me 265.4 miles. And then it had to be a showoff. It also said the journey is 427.1 kilometers, 427,070 metres, 4.271 times 10 to the 7th power centimeters or 230.6 nautical miles.

And that an airplane could travel that distance in 28.9 minutes, sound could do it in 20.9 minutes, light in fiber would need 2 milliseconds and light in a vacuum would need 1.42 milliseconds. That's even before I clicked on "more" to see how long the trip would be for a ship at 25 knots or a car at 55 mph.

Or consider that WolframAlpha is atrocious at sports, which is surprising given what rich sources of data they provide.

I kid you not, the query "Super Bowl scores" yielded the response "WolframAlpha does not yet support Romanian." If you seek a baseball team's pitching stats, you get a useless chart showing, among other figures, the number of batters a team faced in a season. This computing engine doesn't compute the earned run average. Obviously, it's not a golfer.

At least initally, WolframAlpha probably will appeal most to technical specialists - people who make calculations based on how many vertices are on a great rhombic triacontahedron (182) or what gene is 456 base pairs upstream of another given gene.

For most other people, WolframAlpha won't provide aha-wow moments that mark true game-changers.

Once when I was editing a story about a computer display that is 6 inches by 3.5 inches, I wanted to determine the length of the screen diagonal. I asked WolframAlpha for the hypotenuse of a right triangle with sides 3.5 and 6. WolframAlpha told me to calculate it by taking the square root of the sum of 3.5 squared and 6 squared.

Before I could ask, "Isn't that your job?" I queried "hypotenuse calculator" on Google and Yahoo. Neither had any know-it-all pretensions, but no matter: They found multiple sites that calculated the answer just fine.

-----------------------------
BY Brian Bergstein
Source：AP

Copyright © 2008 Fairfax Digital.

Wolfram Alpha to Run On Supercomputers

Wolfram Research said Tuesday that it plans to launch its Wolfram Alpha technology on five different locations, including the world's 44th largest supercomputer.
##CONTINUE##
The reason? The company can't anticipate how much traffic the site will receive, and Wolfram said it wants to be prepared.

Wolfram Alpha is a hybrid of a search engine and an encyclopedia, designed to generate the answer to a search query, rather than the most relevant information. The Wolfram Alpha site goes live on May 18.

What does it all add up to? The ability to handle 175 million queries (yielding maybe a billion results per day)—over 5 billion queries (encompassing around 30 billion calculations) per month," the company wrote in a blog post. "Big ambitions? We hope it's more than enough capacity even at the busiest peak times of the day, and more importantly, that it will give you a great computable knowledge experience."

Wolfram Alpha servers will be located in five sites, labeled as 0, 2, 3, 4, and 5, with the "1" location designated as a backup.

"What computing power have we gathered in these facilities for launch day? Two supercomputers, just about 10,000 processor cores, hundreds of terabytes of disks, a heck of a lot of bandwidth, and what seems like enough air conditioning for the Sahara to host a ski resort," Wolfram added.

One of those sites will be a supercomputer designed by R Systems, dubbed the "R Smarr," ranked the 44th most powerful in the world as measured by the TOP500 list. The system uses a Dell Cloud Computing DCS CS23-SH system, powered by an unknown number of Intel E54xx "Harpertown" processors.

The other sites will also be powered by Dell.

Wolfram co-founder Theodore Gray said in an interview that the company frankly had no idea how much traffic to expect. "Our plans are simultaneously open the site to everyone; that plan is kind of evolving," he said. "We don't have any idea how much traffic to expect, whether we're going to be off by a factor of 10 or a factor of 100."

"We're gonna go live and we're gonna see what happens," Gray said.

-----------------------------
BY Mark Hachman
Source：PCMAG

Copyright © 1996-2009 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Search engine Wolfram Alpha focuses on great answers

Wolfram Alpha can't help you find movie times, the best deal on a netbook, or a link to the latest viral video like Google can
##CONTINUE##
The natural-language search engine Wolfram Alpha is expected to launch May 18 and more details about the site are emerging. Most notably, Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha's creator and the brain behind the computational software Mathematica, says his site is not the next Google killer, but an add-on for your Web searches.

Wolfram Alpha can't help you find movie times, the best deal on a netbook, or a link to the latest viral video like Google can. That's because Wolfram Alpha doesn't index Web pages like a traditional search engine. Instead, the site processes your natural-language query against its database of facts that have been gathered, fact-checked, and organized by Wolfram Alpha staff, according to The New York Times.

When I first covered Wolfram Alpha in March of this year, I said the search engine could only answer a fact-based question that has a specific answer. However, Wolfram Alpha doesn't just spit out one result but compiles a "mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time...It's like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser," according to Wired.

While having your own electronic research assistant sounds impressive, the site's capabilities do have limits. The Times points out that Wolfram Alpha can tell you how far the Moon is from the Earth and the average body mass index of a 40-year old male, but the search engine is stumped by simple queries like "obesity rate" or "housing prices New York."

Wolfram Alpha's creator, Stephen Wolfram maintains that Wolfram Alpha is a work in progress that will never be a complete storehouse of knowledge since human understanding is continually evolving. Wolfram has even built the notion of constant change right into the search engine's name with the term Alpha, which tech companies typically use to identify a product in its early development phase.

Of course Wolfram's qualifier of "change" could also be a cop out in case the product fails. Wolfram Alpha claims to be the first search engine capable of delivering relevant and specific results based on a natural language search query. But that claim has been made before by many different search engines including Powerset (which has since been bought by Microsoft), Ask (twice) and most recently Google. None of these sites, and many others, have truly delivered natural-language results, and I have my reservations about Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram's new search engine has been getting a lot of attention lately and some positive early reviews. But the true test of its effectiveness will come when Wolfram Alpha is available to the public in the next few weeks at Wolframalpha.com. So what do you say -- will Wolfram Alpha be the answer to all your queries or just another over-hyped search engine?

-----------------------------
BY Ian Paul
Source：COMPUTERWORLD

Copyright 2009 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved.

Is Wolfram Alpha better or just different?

Stephan Wolfram’s Alpha search engine is unlike anything that the search world has ever seen. Does that mean that it is better than Google or other “normal” searches, or just that it is different?
##CONTINUE##
Wolfram’s new search engine has been primarily under wraps since it was announced a few months ago. Now some tech reporters have been allowed access to Alpha and some of their impressions have been recorded in a CNET article. It turns out that the answer to the better / different question is “maybe” to both, depending upon who you are and what you want to find.

First, Wolfram is apparently not for everyone. It is a serious research tool, especially for the technically inclined. It may well become the darling of scientists, researchers, analysts, and students while they are at work, but will probably not replace Google even for that group when they are at play. Alpha is an excellent tool for finding answers in objective areas, but the current version leaves much to be desired when looking for subjective answers.

It is also, in its current version, very picky indeed about the query that you build, and sometimes is not consistent even with very similar, but different queries. One seems to need a knack for doing successful searches using Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram himself has this knack, and gets wonderful results. For newer users, the results seem hit and miss. Either it takes a while to learn to use Alpha, or improvements are need in its search algorithms.

The big question on everyone’s mind seems to be whether or not Alpha is a replacement for Google. The consensus for now seems to be a solid “No.” As currently configured, it seems to be a niche product, even though the technical niche is a very large one. Some see Alpha as a way to correlate data from different sources to get new answers, while they see Google’s forte as finding conclusions that have already been reached. More people are after the latter kinds of answers than the former.

In the long run, while Wolfram Alpha may be a wonderful hard-fact tool for the professional researcher, in its current form it does not pose a threat to Google. Alpha would appear to be a tool for data innovators. The information that they build using Alpha today will be available on Google tomorrow.

-----------------------------
BY Michael W. Jones
Source：TECH.BLORGE

Copyright © 2009 BLORGE.

Meet Wolfram Alpha, Google’s latest challenger

Next month, British mathematician Stephen Wolfram launches the internet's most ambitious search engine since Google. It might not be blessed with the catchiest name in tech-biz, but according to believers WolframAlpha will change the very game of Internet search. Cynics, however, are calling it a colossal act of scientific hubris, a stunt that could still end in disaster.
##CONTINUE##
Pre-release images of the WolframAlpha search page show something that looks deceptively like Google.com: a simple search box, and a clickable search button. That's where the similarity ends.

Google retrieves results by trawling the Web, comparing search terms with website content and displaying pages that match. Google doesn't understand our search; nor can it provide any information that hasn't already been published by a third party. In other words, it can answer only the questions that have already been asked, and answered, by content providers and Web publishers.

Stephen Wolfram describes WolframAlpha as a "computational knowledge engine". Not only does it understand the question, it has the mathematical, computational ability to work out an accurate answer. It's primed to answer factual questions related to financial and economic statistics, cooking, geography and much more, questions that haven't necessarily been answered by somebody else. Wherever there's data to be demanded, computed and served, WolframAlpha will, if all goes to plan, be there.

At its philosophical heart is Wolfram's theory (explored in his controversial book A New Kind Of Science) that scientific problems can be reduced to a series of "simple programs". But its engineering heart is Mathematica, maths computer software devised by Wolfram in the late 1980s and continuously developed by Wolfram Research ever since. Within Mathematica are all the "simple programs", theorems and systems to convert raw data into useful answers to real-life questions. If WolframAlpha works, it will be seen as practical validation of the Wolfram approach to science... as well as one of the most ambitious internet launches ever.

Stephen Wolfram has managed to keep more than a hundred "knowledge aggregators" secret while they've worked to collate the world's information, sucking factual knowledge from the Web into a giant electronic collective brain containing everything everybody knows. And because WolframAlpha is aimed at the general internet user, it's also had to learn a system of semantics, so that it can understand the "natural language" used by you or me when we ask it a question.

The concept is very appealing; partly because it¹s so close to the way we used to imagine computers, back in the 1950s and 60s: all-knowing intellectual servants, like Hal, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But, in reality, how will WolframAlpha stay on top of ever-changing and expanding information? Google copes with around two billion search requests a day; how many will the WolframAlpha servers handle before they collapse under the pressure? Most important, how will WolframAlpha's reputation hold up after a single incorrect answer? Will we forgive it the way we forgive, say, Wikipedia, its gaffes?

Expect the media ­ - obsessed as it is with finding a contender pugnacious enough to knock Google from its perch ­ - to focus on WolframAlpha's relationship with the big boys from Mountain View. But really the two will perform entirely different functions. Google's job is to search what we publish, WolframAlpha's to compute what we know.

So, for interesting and opinionated editorial about the causes of and cure for the current recession, Google will continue to lead the way. If you need to know highly defined and tailored economic data ­ the relationship, say, between average US house prices and GDP ­ you might choose WolframAlpha for your data-crunching needs.

The big question is whether WolframAlpha will live up to its rapidly growing expectations... whether it will support Stephen Wolfram's controversial mathematical modeling theories, or turn out to be a quick and ignominious flop.

WolframAlpha launches in May 2009, at www.wolframalpha.com.

-----------------------------
BY Linton Chiswick
Source：The FIRSTPOST

The Humans Who Will Kill the Google Machine

A mild-mannered British physicist is trying to render Google irrelevant. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, a grandiosely ambitious piece of software, has come up with Wolfram Alpha, a grandiosely ambitious engine of knowledge.
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Grandiosely ambitious, and grandiosely inexplicable. Put simply, Wolfram Alpha, due to launch in May, will "compute" answers to questions, where Google and other search engines merely trawl the Web for pages which might hold the answer.

To do this, Wolfram has had a small army of researchers working on systematically analyzing and structuring the corpus of human knowledge so that a computer might be able to answer questions with concrete answers, such as, "How far will the Earth be from the Sun tomorrow?", a question Google completely fails to answer.

The blogosphere has exploded in a jargongasm, with normally sane reporters pretending that sentences like this are English:

Notably, the engine is not built using standard semantic web languages such as RDF, OWL and Sparql, in part because these ontologies are too difficult to build and curate for such a wide field of knowledge.

Whatever. What's important to note here: Where Google's founders have long assumed that computers were the best tools to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible," Wolfram thinks that humans can actually do the job.

In the tradition of the great French encyclopédistes of the 18th century, his Wolfram Research has employed in stealth dozens of brainiacs translating specialized databases into machine-computable form. His approach is a riposte to both Google's idolization of algorithms and the fetish for crowdsourcing that swept Silicon Valley in the middle of this decade. Sometimes the best way to get an answer is to ask someone really smart. Like the Wizard of Oz, Wolfram's researchers lie behind the curtain of the answers Wolfram Alpha will provide. How comforting: What the babbling geeks are calling the next great leap in human knowledge actually has a human side.

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BY Owen Thomas
Source：GAWKER