Searching for Wolfram|Alpha

Okay, computer.

Lazy journalists and high school term paper scribes rejoice – Wikipedia need no longer be your single goto. Meet Wolfram|Alpha, the new uber-search engine devised by scientist and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram. Yes, Wolfram|Alpha sounds like a line intoned by Dame Judy Dench in a spy-thriller; and yes, we all now it’s only a matter of time before someone with Wolfram’s brains and financial resources will attempt to create a “weather machine” or an evil super-computer intelligence. For the time being, however, he’s opted for a “computational knowledge engine for the web.” Though this may or may not be code for “here comes the Singularity, suckas,” it’s presently positioned as a means to query the web with factual questions and receive, presumably, factual answers.

Perhaps it’s just me, but Wolfram’s voice, paired with his explication of his search engine in this screencast, sounds eerily reminiscent of BBC television’s interpretation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Compare and contrast.

Apparently, Wolfram|Alpha has inhaled the web’s collective information into its own massive database and processes answers with an ever-evolving complement of proprietary algorithms borne of Wolfram’s own Mathematica software. What does this mean? The truth is out there and now it’s on you desktop. Just don’t do a vanity search as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld did:

…it doesn’t do so well with searches for people who are not famous. I tried a vanity search of my name, for instance, and it came back with the distance between Erick, Oklahoma and the town of Schonfeld in Saxony, Germany (5,248 miles).

I’ll report the results of my vanity search when Wolfram|Alpha goes live (I can’t wait to read about Greek mythology and Howell County, Missouri).

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