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Wolfram Alpha: rough start, bright future

Late last night, I settled in front of Justin.tv to watch the live debut of a new era in web search. Inappropriately dubbed "the Google killer" (clearly for sensationalist journalism purposes only), Wolfram Alpha's launch was less than sensational. In fact the stream was dropped after about 5 minutes and the launch delayed by complications. So I decided to take short nap. After I woke, I checked again and the stream was still down and the search engine not yet launched. Well, it's 5am now, I'm exhausted, still a bit tipsy, and certainly not that enthusiastic about the launch to stay up any longer. The next day, I decided to give it another go. Success! The much-hyped engine had finally made its debut. So what the heck is this new engine and how does it work? Well, here's an excerpt from their site:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Great aspirations indeed from the young start up, and all indications so far point to a bright future (well, except for those holdups with the launch, which we'll give them a pass on since it was an alpha launch after all). The question that needs to be answered, and not necessarily by them but by the public, is whether this new engine will be adopted by the mainstream internet culture the way that other "innovative" online sites have in the past. Or will Wolfram become another great idea that should have arrived at the right place at the right time, but didn't. To get any indication at this point whether they will achieve mainstream adoption, we'll need to look at how exactly the public is most likely to find value in the service and how they will  use Wolfram to improve the process of finding/processing information from the internet. At this point, Google and Wikipedia are unequivocally the two most popular resources for finding answers to our questions within their respective categories. The former, Google, provides us with the ability to find sites (i.e. other resources) that will provide us with those answers. They do provide plenty of other calculation features, but most people are unaware of them or how to use them. Wikipedia provides us with a seemingly endless encyclopedia of information on particular topics of interest, some accurate, others in strong need of editing. Locating these topics on Wikipedia (and even Google) presupposes our own ability to present the appropriate keyword. How does/will Wolfram fit into our constant quest for information online? Wolfram seeks to do two significant things: 1) understand with uncanny accuracy our questions (an arduous task in and of itself), and 2) process our inquiries and present us with the correct, "objective" answers, always. The first problem to overcome, i.e. our questions, is that of understanding or rather interpreting  a naturally inconsistent human language. Without even confronting the issues presented by multiple languages, the differences between the words people use on a day to day basis and their intended meanings will provide enough stress on the brains and systems behind the service. This is the same problem that will ultimately become so problematic for the semantic web, one that is not a problem of the computational capability, but rather that of "saying" what we mean. Frankly, we cannot be trusted to actually say what we mean, and to gauge the success of such programs on a computer's ability to interpret our chosen words is somewhat a quixotic exercise. Rather, it is us and our words (and language) that must and is evolving and adapting to a new culture of online semantic expression, from the LOLs to the keywords we calculate before executing a search in order to yield desired responses. As far as Wolfram serves to present inarguable "objective data" such as IBM's stock price at a particular moment or the miles between New York and Chicago, we expect them to succeed amazingly. But is that enough, especially since Google has been able to do the same thing for many of the basic inquiries we have and yet people still don't know about the feature (a big part of that is Google's own fault)? When the questions are more difficult and the ways in which they are asked are more colloquial, how well will Wolfram perform? Unfortunately, a test drive during this stage cannot provide us with an indication of how well they will do in the long term, which is a shame because it is ultimately this ability to interpret humans that will determine their ability to even have a chance to penetrate the mainstream population and provide enough value to Joe Smith to compete against the likes of Google and Wikipedia. The second thing Wolfram seeks to accomplish is actually what has made so many of us giddy about the launch, which is the ability to process inquiries in complex ways that no other service online provides. Sure, you can enter "convert 20 feet to meters" in Google and get the answer, but Wolfram seeks to leverage an unprecedented amount of computational power coupled with endless data to answer almost anything we throw at it. What that means and the extent to which they process "stuff" is something we're all trying to explore and will continue to do so for some time. It's too early to judge the system outright, but from the few searches I did today I must say that it provides an interesting alternative to Google and Wikipedia. But will it be enough?