Wolfram/Alpha – A New Kind of Search Engine
By Anna Johnson on April 29th, 2009When it comes to search, it’s conceivable that what ends up being a ‘Google beater’ or ‘Google killer’ may not actually be a traditional search engine at all. Instead, it may be a ‘game-changing’ technology that, if anything, overrides the need for a traditional search engine.
Who knows what that game changing technology will be. Some suggest, however, that ‘Wolfram/Alpha’ – a ‘computational knowledge engine’ – is, if not that game changer, one of the game changers that will provide people with a better way of finding out certain kinds of information than traditional search engines.
Wolfram/Alpha will be made available to the public in a few weeks. Private testing by the folks at Read Write Web reveals that it is designed to generate expert answers to specific kinds of questions.
Rather than rely on an index of websites, Alpha derives its search results from a body of curated data from both public and licensed sources. Using natural language processing algorithms, it organizes that data and generates answers to whatever people type into the search box.
I’m guessing then, that the idea of Wolfram/Alpha is that you type in something you might otherwise type into Google, or even a service such as Yahoo Answers, with the expectation of getting more helpful, expert based answers.
Another distinction between Alpha and traditional search engines is that Alpha will be available as both an advertising-supported free version and a paid version. The paid version will allow people to download and upload data to Alpha.
It’s not exactly clear what you’ll be able to download and upload, but it should be interesting.
For Internet marketers, Alpha – if it takes off – presents both opportunities and challenges.
I think Alpha has the potential to attract a lot of searches that people are currently typing into Google, Yahoo, Live, etc along with services such as Yahoo Answers. That’s business Google and the other search engines will lose unless they come up with something on par with Alpha.
Meanwhile, search engine optimization (SEO) methods are unlikely to work for ranking highly in the Alpha search results. Wolfram/Alpha seems entirely dedicated to basing its results on expert knowledge, rather than optimized web pages. So Internet marketers wanting THEIR answers to come up in the Alpha search results will need to take a different approach.
Until Alpha is released – and depending on whether it gains much if any market traction – these may or may not be issues for Internet marketers. But I for one am keen to give Alpha a go when it’s launched!
