Google crashes Wolfram Alpha debut party

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.

Wolfram Research CEO Stephen Wolfram

(Credit: Stephen Wolfram)

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.

Google now lets people search public data sets.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

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."

[bmzurek]

Pretty bad that the your link under Wolfram Alpha at the top of your article points to the google blog entry and not to the Wolfram Alpha site.

[Shankland]

Thanks, we just fixed it--haste makes copy-paste waste.

[Hunnter2k3]

Gotta love some competition, eh?

But really, i do think it is good, this should lead to both getting better with age, i hope.
It will be a race for finding sources and getting it all online, as usual with the search engine business.

The thing that is different this time is it is both giants when it comes to computational power.
This should be exciting.

[SergeM256]

Link to Wolfram is OK but service will be available in a few weeks (website says in May). Where is a link to a new Google service? All links lead to a blog posting about this service, not to the actual service.

[BIGELLOW]

That's because Google's "service" is built into their standard Google.com search engine. Certain types of queries kick if off. Try searching for POPULATION OF CALIFORNIA in Google... or UNEMPLOYMENT RATE OF NEW YORK in Google.

Of course, something Google has already been for quite a while is direct answers to certain questions. For instance, try searching Google for WHO IS THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA or HOW OLD IS ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER?

[SergeM256]

Then it doesn't really work as advertised. It gives answers on a limited numbers of very simple questions. Try something like "population of IL under age of 16" or "unemployment rate in Chicago" and you will see same old list of millions links somehow related to the question instead of direct answer. Will see what would Wolfram offer when it goes online in May.

[Kimsh]

Having read a little about Wolfram Alpha, I think you are deeply missing its point if you compare it to anythign Google offers. Google is just a search engine with a couple of syntactic tricks.

[luke_marsh]

The difference between wolfram and Google. Goggle found a successful set of search code and haven't really pushed the bar past that much for years and instead has highly capitalised on their find. Wolfram on the Other hand Isn't the worlds best Sales group but is becoming more the IBM of the maths Software world. When you consider just how important making mathematical use of computing power is becoming for an ever wider interest group you can see how acts like this one are the first of many but that at the end of the day If your either a Microsoft man or an IBM man. Either you don't mind a general public tool or you want to get down and work with a maths engineering master. This of course all depends on your criteria. Just because Microsoft exists does not mean IBM isn't still very much appreciated same kind of thing when comparing Wolfram to Goggle.

[rgilmor]

Google didn't do that when I checked it just now. Are you sure this feature is actually online? I just get the normal Google results when I do it

http://www.google.ca/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=unemployment+rate+santa+clara&btnG=Google+Search&meta=lr%3D