![]() In some ways, this is like a Holy Grail that any number of “ invisible web” search engines have chased over the years, the ability to look inside data sources that can’t easily be crawled and provide answers from them. Where Wolfram Alpha amazes is by having a huge collection of statistics and other facts that, at least in the demo I viewed, can quickly be searched through and displayed with the ease and speed of doing a regular web search. Anyone could download data on housing starts, open the information in a spreadsheet like Excel and produce tables and charts. There’s no great magic here in dealing with a single set of data. Wolfram Alpha obtains this data, which gets incorporated into the overall database people search against. More important, it then uses a staff of over 150 people to ensure the information is clean and tagged in a way that Wolfram Alpha can present.įor example, many government agencies publish statistical information, such as the housing starts data I mentioned above. Instead, it’s working with a variety of providers to gather public and private information. ![]() Where’s all this information coming from? Unlike Google or a traditional search engine, Wolfram Alpha isn’t crawling the web and “scraping” information, a process where you try to extract data from a web page. Tapping Into Databases Centralizing The Invisible Web Here’s a shorter version that shows actual screenshots of the service.ĭavid Weinberger also has an excellent summary of the public demo. Wolfram Alpha also made a public demo debut this week at Harvard, which you can watch here: We moved fast! But over at Read Write Web, See Wolfram Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots has more examples you can view. ![]() Want to know how popular the name Daniel is in the United States over time and how many people are currently estimated to be alive with that name, plus their ages? Wolfram Alpha can do that, too - though I wasn’t quick enough to screenshot that example during the demo. Housing starts in the United States? Got that: Looking for the gross domestic product of a country, say France? Wolfram Alpha’s got that: For example, a search for “newport beach” not only shows the current temperature and forecast but also provides easy access to historical temperatures, which also get charted: ![]() Below, my look.ĭo a search on Wolfram Alpha, and if it has matching data, it presents a ton of information on a single page, from figures to charts. I’d call it a “fact search engine” or perhaps an “ answer search engine,” a term that’s been used in the past for services designed to provide you with direct answers, rather than point you at pages that in turn may hold those answers.Įarlier this week, I talked with Stephen to understand how the service works. The service bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” which is a mouthful. Wolfram Alpha is backed by Stephen Wolfram, the noted scientist and author behind the Mathematica computational software and the book, A New Kind Of Science. A Google-killer? Nope! But when the service launches, it should become an essential in anyone’s search tool kit. Will it be as important as Google has become? Perhaps! A new search paradigm? Yes! Or at least a new way of gathering information. Much attention has been focused on the forthcoming Wolfram Alpha search service.
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