Internet answer engine - Wolfram Alpha - computational knowledge engine

Stephen Wolfram is building something new called Wolfram Alpha -- and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose. It's not a "Google killer" -- it does something different. It's an "answer engine" rather than a search engine. Wolfram Alpha is scheduled to open in May 2009.

UPDATES
* May 29, 2009 - Bing.com War With Google - New Decision Engine, coming really soon.

In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a "computational knowledge engine" for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.

It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn't simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example.

Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What is the location of Timbuktu?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?," "What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?," "What is the 307th digit of Pi?," or "what would 80/20 vision look like?"

Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.

Of course, questions abound Wolfram Alpha

It remains to be seen just how smart Wolfram Alpha really is, or can be.

How Does it Work? How Smart is it and Will it Take Over the World? What kind of competition will Wolfram Alpha generate? What is Wolfram Alpha relationship to the Semantic Web? How easily extensible is it? Will it get increasingly hard to add and maintain knowledge as more is added to it? Will it ever make mistakes? What forms of knowledge will it be able to handle in the future? Get the preview of Wolfram Alpha at Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google as well as from Stephen Wolfram, the man himself at Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming!

I opted for this post to be titled as "Internet answer engine - Wolfram Alpha" instead of "Web answer engine - Wolfram Alpha". I bet Wolfram Alpha is going to be a hot keyword and using the longtail keyword of "Web answer engine" has became too competitive. Below are the figures from Google search:

* "Web answer engine" returned 13,900,000 occurrences, whereas
* "Internet answer engine" returned 8,830,000 occurrences,
* "Wolfram Alpha" returned 436,000 occurrences and
* "computational knowledge engine" returned 263,000 occurrences


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