The search for the “Google-Killer” continues: Powerset was not it (and will presumably not become it even after being bought by Microsoft), Search Wikia was discontinued a few weeks ago and Cuil was also not heard from again a few days past its launch. Now its Wolfram|Alpha. Unhumbly named after its developer, Stephen Wolfram (the same person who also developed Mathematica), all hopes are put into this new Google-alternative. Yesterday saw a Webcast of about two hours and to keep the suspense from becoming too immense: Wolfram|Alpha is no Google-Killer.

While the usual course of a search at Google entails the search for a keyword, the subsequent appraisal of the first few results and then usually the finding of the pertinent information on one of the returned sites, Wolfram|Alpha wants to cut out the middle part: the users are supposed to get the answers to their questions in the searchengine itself. Simply put, Wolfram|Alpha collects a huge amount of structured Data and assesses the reliability of those data with the help of a large number (a really large number) of algorithms in order to supply those results. In the screenshot to the right for example, the searchquery “ISS” shows its current position as well as further informations on the Space Station. While this sounds great in theory, there is one crucial problem when it comes to the real world: it can only provide answers to questions for which data is available. And seeing how these structured data which are needed for this are mainly available in the scientific area, we
get a field of application that is rather contained.

And if that would not have been enough, Google announced a similar approach at the same time as the Webcast (which was surely purely coincidental). “Google Public Data” also uses freely available public data and displays them – they might not do it as elaborately as Wolfram|Alpha, but I am sure that Google will learn swiftly ...