A new breed of search engine has made waves this month which goes by the name of Wolfram Alpha. A strange sounding name to the uninitiated, Wolfram Alpha is a computational search engine. What does that mean? Well instead of just serving a list of websites its an engine that literally computes the answers to any factual question you type in. A bit like Ask Jeeves claimed to do. This is across a range of subjects including technology, travel, weather, cooking, and more. The sources of information are scientific journals, encyclopedias, government repositories and any other source the company feels is credible.
The difference between Ask Jeeves and Wolfram Alpha however us that Wolfram Alpha has answers to factual data which means it could do a better job of answering questions. The downside is the engine cannot cope with generic questions such as 'inflation rate' but will do better with 'inflation rate uk', so it may turn away users getting frustrated at not being able to get factual answers even if the answer does exist in Wolfram Alpha. Ask Jeeves failed because the message from the advertising campaigns strongly suggested that people could get any answers they wanted when in reality it was just a search engine.
Google on the hand already to a very limited extent provide factual data similar to Wolfram Alpha for searches on stock market ticker codes, calculation operations, and other information whilst continuing to serve search results below. Google have responded with Google Squared which allows the users to get similar answers to similar factual questions in spreadsheet format although the quality of the results looks like its not quite there according to the YouTube demo.
The rivalry between the two companies is clearly on and nobody knows which search engine will deliver the best structured search results. Given that scientists struggle to agree on certain issues, and the bias of information out there, I think its hard to avoid serving a list of search results with different answers so that users can decide for themselves - no matter how good Wolfram's algorithm will be.
Will people use Wolfram Alpha to shop for the best car or cheapest flights to Croatia? I doubt it unless the engine starts taking in feeds from every air carrier to give users the cheapest flight data. How will Wolfram Alpha monetise its service? Will we see search evolve so that companies lease APIs from Wolfram Alpha and Google for corporate level structured search results? Will Wolfram Alpha end up as another Ask Jeeves? Probably not as Wolfram Alpha is retuning factual data and doesn't promise anything more at this stage. Will Google buy Wolfram Alpha? Maybe, Google could use Wolfram Alpha to power the factual search queries made and also get there hands on Wolfram Alpha's intellectual property instead of reinventing the wheel.
It's too early to draw any conclusions about the impact this may have, but it's great to see a breakthrough in search and finally some potentially real alternatives to Google Search.