i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine that launched in May that is geared toward an educated audience looking just for data. Instead of providing a list of links like Google or another search engine, WA returns just the data and relevant graphs. The system's strengths are real-time calculations, powerful algorithms that search the web, and curated data sets. An article at guardian.co.uk suggests that possible applications are real-time graphs embedded in articles and easy access to mathematical computations. 

Natural language processing is a big problem for WA at this point. Many queries return no results because the engine has difficulty processing them. Right now WA is only popular in academic circles and with researchers because the keyword terms are so specific that the engine doesn't have widespread appeal. WA and Bing struck a licensing deal a few weeks ago, so WA may reach a wider audience through Bing.

WA seems to be a clean way to access basic data, though knowing how phrase queries certainly requires a learning curve. Starting at the examples page is a good way to get an idea of what WA covers, and it could fill a void in the search world as an actual "answers engine" as guardian.co.uk suggests.

Author: Alison Meier