A new form of search?
StevenStephen Wolfram is a Ph.D. physicist and former prodigy who was the originator behind the computational and scientific software Mathematica. Wolfram is nothing if not an original thinker and he has proposed several novel approaches to science and computing. However, his ideas have not had the impact that his press releases advertised. His book, A New Kind of Science, promised a revolution that didn’t come. I actually managed to read some of it but couldn’t see the point.
I present this background because Wolfram now says he has a new approach to searching on the Web and this is creating a lot of discussion. Most of it is based on a post at Twine that begins:
Stephen Wolfram is building something new — and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
Stephen was kind enough to spend two hours with me last week to demo his new online service — Wolfram Alpha (scheduled to open in May). In the course of our conversation we took a close look at Wolfram Alpha’s capabilities, discussed where it might go, and what it means for the Web, and even the Semantic Web.
Heady stuff, that. The post goes on to say that details can’t be released at this time but gives the following description:
In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.
At Ars Technica, Jon Stokes writes:
Mathematician, physicist, and software entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram is promising to do the impossible, again, with the upcoming launch of his “computational knowledge engine.” We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.
Stokes then writes:
But Wolfram hasn’t let the “that’s interesting, but I really have to get back to work” response to NKS from specialists in numerous fields dampen his revolutionary zeal, because he has apparently been at work for the past few years attempting to revolutionize the very production of human knowledge. Behold Wolfram Alpha, launching in May as a “true computational knowledge engine” that, well, allegedly “computes knowledge.” As near as I can tell, Wolfram’s new software takes in a sea of unstructured data from the web, structures it, runs algorithms against it, and produces “facts” and “answers” in response to queries that users enter via a Google-like search box.
If the “it computes knowledge” language above sounds suspiciously vague and outlandish that’s not the fault of my summarizing skills. All of the text that has been written about Wolfram Alpha so far—a corpus that currently comprises all of two posts, one by the guy behind Twine (no stranger to techno-hype) and the other by Wolfram himself—is similarly vague and outlandish.
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