Back to Tech Blog homepageWhoever devised the “soft launch” plan for Steven Wolfram’s new search engine - er, computational knowledge engine - deserves a bonus.
Since Wolfram Alpha was shown off informally to a group of online writers earlier this month, the hype has been building fast. Before long, the question was inescapable: Has the Google-killer finally arrived?
So how does the experience compare to the anticipation? The “alpha” version of the service went live (after a bumpy start) over the weekend. Here are a few impressions, from our own tests and those of other reviewers:
- For some limited types of query, the results are impressive. Want to know the weather on the day you were born, how the population of the city where you live has grown over time, or the answer to a difficult math problem? Wolfram Alpha, which applies its algorithms to a purpose-built database, processes and presents the answers in a clean and clear format. The range of sources the service has tapped already makes it an impressive encylopedia of statistics and facts, says Danny Sullivan.
- The service trips up on the hard problem of natural language search. The holy grail of search has always been to ask a question in “natural” language and have a computer give a direct reply, but several reviewers (like Cnet) have found that the service gets confused easily.
- Nor is it easy to invoke the undoubtedly impressive computational powers of Wolfram Alpha. Pose a query like “GDP France / Italy” and it will divide one by the other: but try to find out the average weight of a 6ft man and the calculation engine runs amok, returning an answer of “930lbs foot males”. That suggests its primary value will be to a specialist audience that can unlock its full potential.
- Because the range of data it covers is limited, the service has no knowledge about a lot of subjects and makes inaccurate guesses about others. Ask about the Ice Age, and you will receive more information about the movie of that name than you could ever want to know. Not the right Ice Age? Helpfully, the service suggests that you might instead mean Ice Age: The Meltdown - another movie.
- Wolfram Alpha feels like it could become a useful research tool. At the moment, though, it isn’t possible to drill down very deeply into any particular subject, and the interface doesn’t guide you to ask further intelligent questions of the results. Those are faults that could be corrected as the database grows and the range of tools expands.
- Google has nothing to be worried about. Even if a specialised service like this wins a passionate following, it can’t make a dent in the general search market that Google so completely dominates. Most users prefer a single destination for search, rather than trying to learn a range of services that are each optimised for a different purpose (one reason why subject-specific “vertical” search engines have never taken off). Also, Google already returns direct answers to some questions, whether about tomorrow’s weather or the GDP of France. But Wolfram Alpha is a reminder that it certainly can’t afford to sit on its laurels.
David Gelles, Joseph Menn, Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in the FT's San Francisco bureau upload their views - plus tech insights from writers in New York, London and Tokyo
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