The next, next big thing: WolframAlpha
Trying to identify the mythical ‘Google killer’ has become something of a sport in certain circles online. Not so long ago Cuil was being hyped to the rafters only to be a crushing disappointment when it finally saw the light of day. Yahoo is actually driving alot of innovation in the search space with its open strategy with tools like BOSS and Search Monkey but something about the chaos that seems to surround Yahoo seems to taint this great work and it gets little love.
The latest next big thing is apparently WolframAlpha. First lets get the obvious prejudices out of the way – naming your app after yourself is narcissistic in the extreme but that shouldn’t get in the way of a great service. Also what the hell is a “computational knowledge engine” – I hope the Plain English Campaign get hold of that one.
My main impression from trying WolframAlpha out was that this was along way from a competitor to Google. Certainly in its current form it is more a competitor to Wikipedia or more traditional reference materials. At best it was able to give me results to one in three of my queries and the results it gave were no great (though I did like the format) and Google was able to get me the same, or better, answers in the first couple of results. By all accounts it handle mathematical and scientific queries better (not surprising as it is built on Mathematica) but that is hardly going to appeal to a mainstream audience.
I’m not knocking it out of hand – I’m sure that as its database expands it will become increasingly useful – as the way with these things – but at the moment it feels very much like a specialist tool, the kind of thing you might have access to in a University Research library or the corporate equivalent rather than something like Google.
I certainly think the hype has hindered the launch more than helped it. They certainly achieved wide publicity but I have seen as many negative reviews as positive but hopefully they will cope with the spotlight rather better than Cuil did.