Wolfram Alpha: beyond search,a knowledge engine

Web users can submit customised questions to the service,and Wolfram Alpha will try to work out the answer on the fly. The chance that a healthy 35-year-old woman will contract heart disease in the next 10 years? One in 167. The temperature in Washington,DC,during the July 1976 bicentennial? An average of 74 degrees.

For questions like these,Google and Wikipedia,perhaps the two best known online reference tools,would search through vast databases of existing Web pages hoping for a match.

Not so with Wolfram Alpha. Were not using the things people have written down on the Web, said Stephen Wolfram,the projects creator and the founder of Wolfram Research Inc,which is based in Champaign,Ill. Were trying to use the actual corpus of human knowledge to compute specific answers.

To do that,Wolfram and his team of human curators have equipped their system with a wide array of mathematical equations,as well as 10 terabytes of data from thousands of sources: scientific journals,encyclopedias,government repositories and any other source the company feels is credible. That generally doesnt include user-created websites.

How much data is 10 terabytes? Ask Wolfram Alpha: Itll tell you thats about half the text-based content held by the Library of Congress.

And theres more to come.

Adding more data and computational capability is an endless process,Wolfram said. The main thing we have to do is to work with experts in every possible domain.

Whether all that specific knowledge will translate into advertising dollars remains to be seen. Some analysts are skeptical about the sites potential to become a Google-like thoroughfare for online consumption. Most search revenue comes from people doing commerce-related searches,said Douglas Clinton,an analyst at investment firm Piper Jaffray Cos. Youre not going to want an answer from Wolfram Alphas computer about what the best digital camera is,because theres not really an algorithmic answer to a question like that.

As a much-hyped entrant into the knowledge search market,Wolfram Alpha has not escaped comparisons to Google and speculation about whether it could steal some of the search giants massive market share. But their mission statements make it clear that the two services are not identical. Google famously hopes to organise the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful.

The focus of Wolfram Alpha,on the other hand,is to make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Lofty hopes,but neither is there yet.