Graham Edgecombe

Wolfram|Alpha and Google

Lots of people who have written about this new, ambituous project and said it is competing with Google. The truth is, it isn't. In fact, I don't think it is even going to be as large as Google, for reasons I outline in the rest of this post.

Google is a search engine. It searches the web for web pages. Wolfram Alpha has data already built in related to maths, science, engineering and geography: Google doesn't have such data built in. Alpha doesn't just search the data: it performs computations on it.

For instance, enter the equation: x^2 + y^2 + z^2 = 1 and it'll draw a sphere. If you typed that into Google, you'd get a results page, maybe one of them would have a sphere drawn, maybe not.

Google can however do limited Maths: 1 + 1 will return 2 on Google. However, Google can't do something like this yet: 0 = 3x^2 + 5x - 3. Google will return a series of meaningless pages, whereas Alpha actually solves the equation and draws a graph!

Although Google has progressed in some areas - you can type: height of the eiffel tower and it will return the height just as would happen in Alpha, you cannot type something more complex: population of UK vs population of France. In Google, it will just return web pages, whereas in Alpha it actually shows the current values and draws a graph comparing the history of the two populations.

Alpha can do more than even that! It can do things such as searching the human genome, chemical molecules, musical notes and even resistor colour codes (and a whole lot more, see this page: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ for a list of examples).

And as for people who think it is going to be as important as Google, I think it may not. Technically it is an amazing feat - maybe more amazing than Google, however, in a wider social context I can't see it being as well used. Will the average person use it? Probably not. Google can search the whole web, so it is suitable for everyone, whereas Alpha is more appropriate for students, scientists, mathematicians, engineers and such. Even as I say that, you cannot draw comparisons. Alpha is not a search engine, Wolfram Research have coined the term 'computational knowledge engine' which is a more appropriate term.