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Guest post by Peter Walker

A revolutionary new way of searching the web is due to go live next month. Called Wolfram Alpha, after it’s creator Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the Mathematica programme and book ‘A New Kind of Science’, it has the potential to be as important a step forward for the internet as Google or Wikipedia.

Crucially though, it’s not a ‘Google killer’, instead think of it as an ‘answer engine’ (or as Wolfram prefers to call it a ‘computational knowledge engine’) rather than a search engine.

The basic idea is that you can ask it factual questions and it computes the answers for you.

Using the immense computing power of Wolfram’s Mathematica programme, sophisticated Natural Language Processing algorithms and a vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources, Alpha answers your question rather than giving you links to possible answers.

Your search can return graphs, charts, pictures, suggested links and even answers to even the most complex calculations in seconds, making it a potentially one stop shop for students and professionals alike.

So whilst it won’t necessarily rival conventional search engines for less specific or commercially focused searches, it does look set to seriously challenge sites like Wikipedia for easy information gathering.

Incredibly Wolfram and his team of more than a hundred people have been secretly working on the project for several years, creating a vast system of reusable, computable knowledge, from terabytes of raw data on massive server farms; how the competition will react remains to be seen.

So far only a few ‘invite only’ guests have been given demonstrations of the site (due to launch in May) but from the buzz these few lucky bloggers are creating, this launch is not to be missed.

For more detailed analysis, have a look at these:

http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wolframalpha_our_first_impressions.php

Related articles by Zemanta

• Wolfram Alpha Computes Answers To Factual Questions. This Is Going To Be Big. (techcrunch.com)
• Stephen Wolfram and the techno-dianetics of Google-ology (arstechnica.com)
• Can Wolfram Alpha kill Google or will it just be the next Cuil? (daniweb.com)

This entry was posted on May 5, 2009 at 12:12 pm and is filed under News.

Tags: algorithm, alpha, Google, mathematica, search engine, stephen wolfram, wikipedia