Wolfram Alpha is Not a Web Search Engine

The much awaited Wolfram Alpha has finally become live for every one. Lately it has been very much in the news, being touted as a next generation search engine which could overtake Google in the future.

What is Wolfram Alpha?

Contrary to all expectations, Wolfram Alpha is not a regular web search engine. As per the FAQ posted on it’s website, “it is a ‘Computational Knowledge Engine‘ which generates output by doing computations from it’s own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links”.

For e.g., you can’t get any results for search words like ‘Windows XP troubleshooting’ or ‘Windows 7 RC download’. The Alpha engine takes a good amount of time for ‘processing’ these search terms and finally ends up say ‘Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.’!

What to expect from Wolfram Alpha?

The Examples section on the website gives a glimpse of all the different ways you can use this engine. The engine is best used in digging huge amounts of information and presenting it in the form of charts, pie diagrams and tables. It is used for mathematical and chemical formulas, statistical data analysis, weather forecasts, comparison of stocks, geographies, materials and lot many other things presented in the form of tables and graphs.

Here is an example of Wolfram Alpha’s data analysis and mining capabilities. A comparison of two companies, Microsoft and Apple gave the results in a well structured tabular form as shown in the screenshot below.

You can find a host of other examples at it’s website.

Who can use Wolfram Alpha?

Anyone who wants to visualize data in a way not possible with a regular search engine can find this Computational Engine very effective. Researchers and Students may be the most benefited users of Wolfram Alpha.

Is Wolfram Alpha a Competitor to Google?

Wolfram Alpha, as of now, is not a competitor to Google or for that matter any other web search engines. We in fact think that it is a very good tool which is complementary to regular search engines. Using it in conjunction with a web search could provide amazing results.