Digital Media

The online "computational engine" supplies answers to factual, data-intensive questions but also does math in the process. Is it really a Google rival, or something different?

Wolfram Alpha searching for its niche

One week after its debut, CNET readers found the service hard to use and not all that helpful. Wolfram is no Google, but it's no Cuil, either.
• Wolfram Alpha is live; give us your impressions
(Posted in Webware by Tom Krazit)
May 22, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

Firefox add-on puts Alpha in your Google

Curious to use Wolfram Alpha, but don't want to give up Google as your main search engine? Now you can use both at the same time with this Firefox extension.
• Ads appear on Wolfram Alpha
(Posted in Webware by Josh Lowensohn)
May 20, 2009 1:29 PM PDT

Wolfram Alpha launches amid glitches

Myriad problems prevented Wolfram Alpha from going live Friday evening as expectations for full service were reset for Monday.
(Posted in Cutting Edge by Tom Krazit)
May 15, 2009 6:03 PM PDT

'Snag' could delay Wolfram Alpha launch

Stephen Wolfram says a large-scale traffic simulation test failed, which puts the planned Friday debut of the new online tool in question.
(Posted in Cutting Edge by Michelle Meyers)
May 15, 2009 2:27 PM PDT

Wolfram Alpha gets supercomputer boost

Two supercomputers--one of them the 66th fastest in the world at present--will power the Wolfram Alpha site for search, calculation, and data crunching.
(Posted in Cutting Edge by Stephen Shankland)
May 12, 2009 12:17 PM PDT

Wolfram Alpha shows data in a way Google can't

CNET News editor Rafe Needleman and reporter Stephen Shankland discuss their ups and downs with the search engine that computes.
(Posted in Webware by Rafe Needleman and Stephen Shankland)
May 5, 2009 12:04 AM PDT

Video: Wolfram Alpha, first hands-on

CNET's Rafe Needleman gets a look at the eagerly anticipated new computational search engine, Wolfram Alpha. Is it a Google killer? No, but it has the potential to change the way we view data on the Web.
May 5, 2009 4:02 PM PDT

Google crashes Wolfram Alpha debut party

Mathematica maker publicly demonstrates a Web service to dig into data like stock prices or mortality--but Google launches a similar service on the same day.
• Google adds new depth to complicated searches
• Mathematica 7 arrives with built-in human genome
(Posted in Cutting Edge by Stephen Shankland)
April 28, 2009 1:45 PM PDT

Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?

Stephen Wolfram has come up with a new and potentially revolutionary search paradigm for finding answers via the Web.
(Posted in Outside the Lines by Dan Farber)
March 8, 2009 8:42 AM PDT

Now that Wolfram Alpha is up and running, the next question is whether it can make any money.

Wolfram Research appears to have sold the first ad on the search engine to Lenovo, as noted by Search Engine Land. An ad for the ThinkPad appeared recently next to a Wolfram Alpha search for "pi," the mathematical constant.

It's not clear how advertising works on Wolfram Alpha but it does not appear that Wolfram has duplicated Google's keyword-based search ad approach as yet. The site has said it will accept corporate sponsorship, however. Lenovo's ad was a text ad for the ThinkPad that turned into a display ad when a visitor moused over the text.

Wolfram Alpha is live, and we want your feedback.

Following a delay due to technical glitches, the new "computational knowledge engine" went live to the public Friday night, and we're interested in learning more about the public's initial experiences with the service. If in case you missed it, Wolfram Alpha can be found here.

You may want to familiarize yourself with the service before giving it a try. For more background on how Wolfram Alpha works, read this exchange between CNET's Stephen Shankland and Rafe Needleman, who were given early access to the service. This photo gallery of screenshots will let you know what to expect as you put the new service through its pace.

Once you get your hands on it (so to speak) we're mostly interested in whether or not you feel it retrieved the results you were looking for, or answered the questions you entered. Try broad queries like the weather; try specific queries about your favorite sports team, hometown, or profession.

And once you've kicked the tires, please fill out the form below so we can measure the search engine's performance and relevance during its debut. Wolfram has already warned us that the service might encounter initial launch problems over the weekend, so keep that in mind.

Thanks for your help, and we'll follow up next week with the results.

Wolfram Alpha is like a cross between a research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine. But does Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine," set to debut publicly later this month, live up to its hype as a Web site that Google needs to be afraid of?

Wolfram Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram on Tuesday gave a demo of the service to a crowd of online reporters. Few have access to the private test version of the service itself, but we got access Monday night. We found it compelling, if limited.

We're eager to see this site develop. It does things with online information that Google does not. Here are our impressions of the current version of Wolfram Alpha.

Who's it for?

CNET reporter Stephen Shankland: Today at least, Wolfram Alpha is for the tech crowd--the kind of people who want to dig into the data. It's a great exploration tool to find out whether somebody who's 5 feet 5 inches and 160 pounds is overweight, the chemical properties of boron, and whether you're going to get a full moon during the evening of September 4 in Buenos Aires when you want to propose to your fiancee.

It'll tell you the family, genus, species, and caloric value of an apple, and it'll forecast Apple's stock price, but it won't give you apple pie recipes. It'll tell you the box office take of the first "Star Trek" movie, but it won't tell you the theater where you can see the newest "Star Trek" movie.

But a technical audience is still big. This could unlock a lot of data that students, research assistants, lawyers, marketing managers, financial analysts, and scientists might not have readily available. And those folks are important, too--just the kind of influential folks people with Web sites like to reach.

CNET Editor Rafe Needleman: I wouldn't dream of pointing my parents at this. It's too picky about syntax and not intuitive to get into. When I saw Stephen Wolfram give a demo of the system I was blown away. He ran through dozens of demos from weather to genetics to calculus to finance, each resulting in beautiful and informative results. But when I tried the service I'd say maybe only 10 or 20 percent of my queries actually worked.

Shankland: On the other hand, my dad has a Ph.D. and I most definitely will point him at it. He bought Wolfram Research's all-purpose computation software, Mathematica, though, so for him Wolfram Alpha is like preaching to the choir.

Needleman: My dad has a Ph.D., too, but in philosophy. There is no Wolfram Alpha for that.

Shankland: Yet. Alpha handles numeric data well, but loosey-goosey stuff like art or philosophy is tough. But maybe in some glorious future Alpha will be able to chart the trains of thought from the Enlightenment to the present.

Is it easy to use?

Needleman: You need a clear mind to take advantage of this service. Again, it's picky about syntax, and in the pre-release version we tried, if you got a query wrong--if it didn't return what you were looking for--it wouldn't offer you much in the way of help to refine the query. I kept trying to figure out how to correlate weather with earthquakes in San Francisco. I can get the data for weather. I can get it for earthquakes. So I know that Alpha has the information. But I can't figure out how to show them together.

What the system does know is beautifully presented. Type in the name of a city, for example, and it will give you some fun stats on a clean and clear Web page. But from that sort of page you'll probably want to start exploring the data available: Maybe you want to know about population growth, economic information, or weather trends. Alpha doesn't give you hints as to what's available, nor a good way to drill into data. You have to take stabs at re-typing your query. I tried a variety of queries like "test scores san francisco schools" and "population of portland by year" and got, respectively, no result and a pointless result (533,429 person years: what is that?). The system that interprets Wolfram Alpha queries needs a little bit of help. It may be improved by the time the system is opened to the public, later this month, but I think that this will be the product's Achilles heel.

... Read more

Updated at 3:12 p.m. PDT with further detail.

Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram publicly debuted his company's forthcoming online "computational knowledge engine" Tuesday--but search Goliath Google launched a service of its own that bears significant resemblance.

The Wolfram Alpha engine is a Web service designed to process data from controlled, vetted sources of data--many not on the Web--then present the results in a way that lets people dig deeper into the subject. It's something of a cross between a graphing calculator, repositories of scientific data, and a system to interpret questions posed in human terms.

"Like interacting with an expert, it'll understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and present the results in such a way you'll be able to understand what the consequences are," Wolfram said in a talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society Tuesday.

For example, people can ask about the molecular weight of caffeine, about the location of a gene in the human genome, the number of people named Andrew born in a particular year, the amount of fish produced in France, the life expectancy of 40-year-olds, and the performance of Microsoft stock--and then dig into the results. The height of Mt. Everest can be expressed in terms of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Wolfram has deep technical chops. He's a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient who got his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at age 20, founded Wolfram Research to commercialize mathematics software called Mathematica that can perform a wide variety of computational and graphing chores. He also spent a good portion of the 1990s writing "A New Kind of Science," a 1,200-page tome (also available online) that seeks to transform science by presenting a computational view of physics.

The Alpha site will be publicly available "in a few weeks," with free access to all users supported by sponsors and subscriptions for heavy-duty users who want the system to process their own data, Wolfram said.

Gatecrashing Google
But another similar service is available today: a Google feature that can search public data and present the results graphically.

"We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data," Ola Rosling said of the service in a blog post. "The data we're including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers' salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on."

The service is based on Google's 2007 acquisition of Trendalyzer, Rosling said.

One example: "When comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara's peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate," he said.

Thus far, Google's service includes data only from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division.

"We hope people will find this search feature helpful, whether it's used in the classroom, the boardroom or around the kitchen table. We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations," he said.

Google didn't immediately comment about whether the timing of its launch was coincidental, and Wolfram Research didn't immediately comment on the Google product.

Alpha's underpinnings
Alpha has four main components, Wolfram said.

• Data curation. Wolfram Alpha uses public and licensed proprietary data sources, and the company uses automated processes and human choices to prepare the data. "At some point you need a human domain expert in front of it," Wolfram said.

• Algorithms. Alpha must pick the right computational processes to present its results. "Inside Wolfram Alpah are 5 million to 6 million lines of Mathematica code that implement all those methods and models," he said.

• Linguistic analysis to understand what a person typed. "I thought one of many things that could have gone wrong was that short, lazy things would (have) huge amounts of ambiguity," for example figuring out whether "50 cent" had to do with musical artists or money. "That turned out to be not nearly as much of a problem as we expected."

• Presentation. "There are tens of thousands of possible graphs. What do you want to show people?" Wolfram asked.

Wolfram hopes the tool will help researchers perform scientific chores that before were possible but not necessarily worth their time.

"What's the angle of sun at particular moment? Given 20 minutes, I could compute it and get it right, but I probably wouldn't bother," Wolfram said. "What Wolfram Alpha does is take that piece of scientific knowledge and make it immediately accessible to everybody."