WolframAlpha: A Successful Search Engine Approach?
Posted on 19. May, 2009 by Julius.
I recently stumbled across WolframAlpha, a completely new search engine which just launched a few days ago. It is actually a very interesting approach they take as a “computational knowledge engine”.
Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.
Obviously WolframAlpha aims at answering questions not by providing links to web sites (they actually do link to web site, but only to a few) but by presenting aggregated data.
How Does it Work?
WolframAlpha is based on the Mathematica core which took around 20 years to develop. WolframAlpha automatically detects what kind of information you are interested in by using the keywords you typed in.
For example let’s say you typed in John. WolframAlpha’s engine will then automatically detect that John is a name and thus it will return information about the name John back to you. To make it clear that you want information about a name use name John as a query and it should return the same information.
It works the same with different keywords such as countries. Enter france into the search box and hit enter. Again you should see information popping up but this time concerning a country, i.e. France.
You can further compare names or countries to each other just by entering USA France into the search field.
If you are completely new to WolframAlpha it might be best to get used to it by taking a look at the query examples.
There is also an interesting article on SEOBook about the new search engine which is worth to look at.
Conclusion
In my opinion it is a very successful approach as a search and knowledge engine. I think it would be even more effective if the company would start to create country specific versions of the web site, which they are probably working on at the moment.
Overall WolframAlpha is something totally different compared to other search engines and that’s what makes it so interesting. I am further very interested in how WolframAlpha will change in the future.
What do you think of WolframAlpha?
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