Wolfram Alpha Set For Launch

With Wolfram Alpha set to launch in the next week, there’s been a lot of hype around the potential impact it may have on the web. Wolfram Alpha is the latest in an array of new search engines, which has been developed by the mathematician Stephen Wolfram. It differs from other search engines in that it’s being billed as a “computational knowledge engine” which presents information it has collected from various sources to the browser, rather than just returning a list of potentially relevant sites.

In essence, it’s an engine that deals with facts and figures, with the information being drawn from its comprehensive and presumably ever expanding database. I’m sure I’m not the only one who, on first hearing of Wolfram Alpha, thought to myself of the need to come up with a better name. And that very issue has been under debate in Wolfram Alpha HQ, with Wolfram himself saying “Whether this ends up being Wolfram Alpha or overtaking our Wolfram.com site, that’s a subject of great internal debate at our company. We were keen to make sure this product is associated with our brand. Worst case, if we never figure out a business model at all, it’s great example of what the technology we have built can do. Our corporate name is as good a nonsense word as any Web 2.0 word.”

So despite any questions that may be raised about the branding aspect of Wolfram Alpha, there are no such reservations about the underlying technology or computational power it will hold. Using a Dell powered supercomputer, it will have the ability to process 39.6 trillion mathematical operations per second, and should have capacity to handle 175 million queries per day. “Inside Wolfram Alpha are 5 million to 6 million lines of Mathematica code that implement all those methods and models,” Wolfram said.

Wolfram Alpha doesn’t index pages or scrape the web in the manner of other search engines, it relies on data providers and its staff of 150 to add to its data set. This makes it quite a manual process to maintain up-to-date information and expand data sources, and also involves ongoing costs that will need to be funded. Wolfram Alpha, by nature, isn’t fit for ecommerce sites so you may be wondering how they’ll recoup their investment and keep their finances ticking over? The first and most obvious means is through sponsorships that they’ll have listed on the right hand side of their results pages. Whether or not this is targeted to the input query remains to be seen, but it’s difficult to envisage given the nature of the predicted search queries. It has also been suggested that a corporate version may be released for the more computation heavy users. It looks like the more likely path to success for Wolfram Alpha is for them to be bought out, and incorporated into, one of the major search engines, which Wolfram has said they’d consider should the initial reaction be a success.

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