Wolfram|Alpha promises what you expected from the computer 50yrs back
May 4th, 2009
Working since years in background Physicist Stephen Wolfram has been working on a new search engine: Wolfram|Alpha. WolframAlpha computes search queries in natural language (they way humans ask them). The results are in form of graphs, charts, and detailed explanations.
A demo video and the Wolfram blog gives several examples on how Wolfram|Alpha is different than all other approaches witnessed by us to organize data on the web. Wolfram|Alpha is built with Mathematica (and A New Kind of Science). Mathematica was originally conceived by Stephen Wolfram and is in existence since over 20 years.
…the five million lines of Mathematica code that make up Wolfram|Alpha are equivalent to many tens of millions of lines of code in a lower-level language like C, Java, or Python.
According to an example given, WolframAlpha would give you the exact distance between the earth and the moon, along with the general average that normal search queries would give you. (The distance between the earth and moon varies as per earths movement. The variation can be as much as a mile every minute).
Wolfram Alpha is all set to enter the long list of potential Google Killers, none of which have so far managed to capture any significant market. Last year Cuil launched with a lot of hype, but lost momentum pretty soon. The search engine market is long dominated by Google and the industry still awaits a solid competitor.
Wolfram Alpha would go live sometime in May. Keep a watch here
Also see video of the hardware backup being put in place
Categories: First look, Tech Industry News | Tags: google competitor, new search engine, search engine, WolframAlpha | No Comments
