Brief introduction about Wolfram Alpha

Pau Wing Hong

Wolfram|Alpha (also known as Wolfram Alpha) is more than a search engine like Google. Instead, it is an answer-engine/computational engine developed by Wolfram research. Traditional search engines like Google and yahoo, which are only capable of providing a list of links to information, don’t answer questions. They only take your keywords at face value and don’t always yield good results. What really makes Wolfram Alpha shines is that it can compute, just like a calculator. It computes solutions and responses from a structured knowledge database.

Since the day it starts, the Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Engine contains 50,000 types of algorithms and models and over 10 trillion pieces of data. It is still in development, and is always accumulating new information to its database. As Wolfram|Alpha is running on 10,000 CPUs with Mathematica running in the background, it is capable of answering complicated mathematical questions.

The service is built on four basic pillars: a massive amount of data, a computational engine built on top of Mathematica, a system for understanding queries and technology to display results in interesting ways. Wolfram Alpha is also able to answer fact based questions such as “When did Steve Jobs die?” It displays its response as date, time difference from today and Anniversaries for October 5, 2011.

There are a number of things that Wolfram Alpha vastly different from Google. First of all, it is capable of answering complex queries. If complex search queries are typed into Google, it will get confused. This is because it can’t compute, unlike Wolfram Alpha. Just like a calculator, it does not care at all how many arguments are given to it. That’s why concatenating many arguments in a query often works extremely well. Apart from it, the answers and calculation from Wolfram Alpha is very accurate and precise. There is no need to worry about the validity of the information. Thirdly, two sets of data can be compared with graphs easily using Wolfram Alpha in which Google cannot.

Nevertheless, Wolfram Alpha does have its limitations. Since its answers are based on its own software and knowledge database. Wolfram Alpha can only answer a fact based question that has a specific answer. So it is not able to answer open ended questions like “Is Wolfram Alpha better than Google?”

As written in its main page, Wolfram Alpha’s goal is to bring deep, broad, expert-level knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Clearly, the “Google Killer” is quite ambitious. However, in my opinion, Wolfram Alpha is not a typical search engine in essence. Therefore it is not a Google Killer as people might say, but it can be considered as a giant calculating encyclopaedia of statistics and facts. I think the site poses more of a threat to sites like Wikipedia.