The “Smartest Search Engine” In The World Launches This Month

by

Wolfram Alpha.

If you haven’t heard about this new search engine, your about to.

Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, is launching this month as the first search engine that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information,  all properly sourced,  such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

According to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram, the search engine will be able to work things out “on the fly.  If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it tells you.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is “curated”, meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.

You can also read about this search engine here.

You can watch a 10 minute video demonstration about it here.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. D says

    “Launching May 2009”
    Everyone would like to make a “Google killer”, but…

  2. Tony says

    Wolfram is a very bright guy. I’m talking Nobel Prize level smarts. He published his first academic paper at 15 and got his PhD at Caltech at 20 and just getting a BS from there is a tour de force. Problem with Wolfram is that he tends to overhype his accomplishments and minimizes other’s. Case in point is his book “A New Kind Of Science” in which he stakes sole claim of “discovering” a new branch of science, cellular automata (modeling complex phenomena using basic objects governed by basic rules), that a group of physicists actually pioneered before him. He cites no previous work from others in this book which gives the impression that it is completely original. He did come up with a few new results and axioms in the field but he thought this would revolutionize science. It has not.

    My undergraduate background was in physics so I used his Mathematica program a lot in college. It is the standard and the best symbolic math program out there for sure. So I give him more “cred” when it comes to software than science. I haven’t checked out the demo but it remains to be seen whether this is another hype job.

  3. Steve M says

    You’re right, Tony; he is Nobel level smart.

    But is he (and his group) smarter in the aggregate than the entire, larger teams of also very smart PhDs and other experts and great thinkers that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have working constantly on search?

    And…is his “new search” something that G, M, and Y wouldn’t in any case be able to reverse engineer; or otherwise quickly match or approximate (which is good enough when you’re already a market leader)?

    And for gosh sake, I hope they come up with or buy a better name for it than anything with “Wolfram” in it.

  4. Dominik Mueller says

    Terrible name for an online service. But if the technology is good and the search engine is easy to use, it will be a success. Of course, the relative success compared to G/Y/MS depends on those companies’ reactions to it and whether WolframAlpha really delivers what it promises. If it’s good, it’s also possible that one of those companies will simply acquire it.

  5. Patrick McDermott says

    These comments from the Guardian article I think put the Wolfram Alpha SE
    in perspective:

    “it’s a search engine that is on the web, not an engine that searches the web”.

    “If (Wolfram Alpha) doesn’t know the answer to something, it reverts to a
    more traditional web search engine system where it points you towards places that might have the information you’re looking for.”.