Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Well, the official launch of the much talked about Wolfram|Alpha is now May 18th, although a soft launch did indeed begin last night.  Access is said to slowly become available to everyone throughout the weekend.  A few press folks were able to get their hands on it to give it a spin ahead of time.

So, the verdict?  Like founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram kept stating, it really isn’t like Google.  Although of course everyone will be comparing it to the big “G.” 

“We are not a search engine. No searching is involved here,” Wolfram said. “The types of things that people are currently searching for have some overlap [with Google], but it isn’t huge. What’s exciting is that we have a whole new class of things that people can put into a input field and have it tell them what it knows.”

The way Wolfram|Alpha works is by taking a query, and providing an answer.  What also makes it really impressive is the way it does intelligent things even when you offer up non-query related info.  For instance, it can calculate distance even when you don’t specify where you are by inferring your location (most likely by reading your IP address), and from there it adjusts the data accordingly.

It doesn’t always understand what you are asking though.  When it doesn’t get what you are trying to say, you will get the message “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”.  Or, if it simply doesn’t have enough to work with, you receive a “development of this topic is under investigation…” message.  So, it isn’t failproof at this point.

It’s probably a good idea to check out the pre-populated “examples” to get an idea of how to structure your queries when you are first getting started using WA.  Because although you are able to use natural language, some questions feature structured input fields like weights, dates, and measures so you can be more specific in your questions than you would be in natural language.

At this point, there are still some obvious gaps in its knowledge base.  However, it is still quite an impressive database regardless for searchers.  I’m curious to see how in does in the long run with keeping up to date with ever-changing information.

Check it out: [Wolfram|Alpha]