Google thrown to the wolves?
Most in the tech industry have probably heard of the release of Wolfram Alpha, a new search engine which promises to deliver results in a unique way. Instead of using keywords or phrases which is how all major search indices work, Wolfram Alpha uses a language engine to parse actual human readable questions and deliver responses appropriately and intelligently. In fact, the application prefers the branding “knowledge engine” instead of “search engine.” Some outlets have hailed that Wolfram Alpha may be the first nail in the Google coffin because of it’s natural application to humans. Is it?
Wolfram Alpha was launched this past Friday to huge pomp and circumstance, and like Bill Gates’ release of Windows 98, the application failed almost immediately. Nonetheless, Wolfram Alpha was back up by the weekend and rebranded as a test release. This isn’t completely uncommon nor does it affect my first impression of it… yet. So let’s get to work.
What can you ask a computer? Anything I guess. As many of my close friends know, I’m quite privy in the kitchen and one thing I’m always doing with a laptop in the kitchen is conversions. So I asked Wolfram Alpha the following question: “How many ounces are in 14 gallons?” This probably isn’t a question I would ever ask it, but why not.
Wolfram Alpha first interpreted my input with some pretty advanced regular expressions I’m guessing.
Convert 14 gallons to fluid ounces
So far so good. It has correctly determined what I’m looking for.
1792 fluid ounces
There we have it. It correctly did the conversion for me. Here’s where I got really impressed. Not only did it give me what I’m looking for, it also gave me some other important ancillary information.
56 quarts
112 pints
224 cups
53 liters
0.053 cubic meters
52,996 cubic centimeters
Very nice. The first 3 or 4 could be applicable before delving into information that may be useful to scientists or researches, certainly not to the amateur chef. It quickly devolves from usable everyday information into more scientific babble as it presents comparisons as volume.
(6 x 10-4 to 0.0014) x forty-foot equivalent unit (2TEU)
(0.001 to 0.002) x twenty-foot equivalent unit (680 to 1520ft3)
(0.0024 = 1/423) x standard volume (1000 mol molar volume constants)
Wolfram Alpha gives a few more tables of information that I’m not going to share because I didn’t understand what the last one meant and I imagine it gets deeper from there. Overall, I would say that Wolfram Alpha did its job and presented my question with more than appropriate answers.
Now let’s have some fun with Wolfram Alpha. I asked it a question without a clear answer because of bias. A computer is supposed to be unbiased, right? Go.
What is the best college in North Carolina?
This review hangs on the answer to this question. If it answers North Carolina State University, I’ll be happy. Any other, I’ll claim it to be junk. What did Wolfram Alpha say?
Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.
Fair enough. It gave me some suggestions on “good input” and provided links to things I may have meant, one of which is “college in North Carolina.” That term was a link, so I clicked it. The result? Wolfram still couldn’t understand what to do with my new input that it provided. I don’t see a real problem with this since the question wasn’t a great one to begin with.
I tested a few more searches with Wolfram and found that it is actually really well done when asking questions of fact. Who was the 17th President of the United States. Andrew Johnson came up and gave me some good information on Johnson, including biographical information, his successors and predecessors, even his Vice President (which was blank because he didn’t have one). Wolfram Alpha handles this type of question extraordinarily well.
As a first impression, I don’t see Wolfram Alpha as being much of a competitor to Google. Google doesn’t try to answer questions as much as it gives you a place to go to find the information you are looking for. Wolfram isn’t going to tell you where to get the best pizza in town or deliver a blog about the best colleges in the area. Google will. If Wolfram Alpha is a competitor to anyone, it would be Wikipedia but it would need several more evolutions from here to rise to that.
