Utilising the backend of Stephen Wolfram’s Mathematica tool, Wolfram Alpha aims to calculate all the most relevant ways to display data and give it to the searcher ready-formatted. For instance entering a mathematical formula will give the user the opportunity to enter values to the independent variables and receive a result for the dependent variable. It will also display some alternate formulations and the key derivatives etc.

The system uses human-chosen datasets available in the public domain, and tries to understand what kind of dataset it is and what people will want to do with it.

Wolfram Alpha suggesting alternate formulae

This system is fairly useful for mathematical operations as shown in the screenshot above, but it has some pretty interesting other uses.

Wolfram Alpha listing musical notations

Above are the results when looking at a musical chord. Never spend time rooting through your musical textbooks or learn-to-play CDs. Your one-stop-shop for chord patterns is right here.

But in my opinion the most interesting is the result of searches on physics concepts. It actually allows you to enter variables and will calculate results for you.

Wolfram Alpha does physics for you

Above you can see the actual plotted path of a projectile for the input values you select. Raise or lower the angle, speed up or slow down the launch speed.

Implications for casual searchers or for replacing any existing search engine aren’t exactly frightening. It won’t solve many searching needs. But those ones it does handle, it handles in a new and useful way. As more datasets are indexed we might see this become a research tool to rival (and hopefully for accuracy’s sake exceed) wikipedia.

Could it work as an advertising platform? Possibly. I could imagine that on the searches I’ve shown above several textbook publishers might be interested to show their products to the people searching on these terms. Or Atlases for geography searches. Or many other things I haven’t thought of. But the trouble is, if the search engine works well enough, then it should in essence be replacing the need for those items for a lot of uses. If I’m searching for a list of major exports then an Atlas would likely serve me well. But if Wolfram Alpha starts showing it consistently enough, then I won’t need one any more. So we might see advertising start to appear, but only if the success lies within that magical middle ground of being good enough to attract users, but poor enough not to replace the items it will likely advertise.

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  21st May 2009