Right before Microsoft’s Bing was announced, another new search-related website was getting the spotlight, WolframAlpha.com. Wolfram Alpha was created by Stephen Wolfram, who is also the creator of the highly respected
research focused application, Mathematica.

While this new website has received quite a bit of attention recently, many people still seem to be somewhat confused about how it works. A lot of this confusion is probably sue to the fact that many people are calling the system a “search engine,” but that is not really what it is. A more appropriate label might be a knowledge or “information engine.”

Wolfram Alpha lets you type in natural language questions, which it then tries to use basic public data to calculate an answer with. Wolfram and his team created a number of scripts that handle different types of questions by collecting, aggregating, and presenting a report of related data in an attempt to answer the questions.

Unfortunately, users must learn the forms of questions that Wolfram Alpha can process, and at this time, it is still fairly limited. However, once its limitations are understood, it can be used very effectively to perform calculations, and summarize recent factual data (such as “What is the population of…”). One of its advantages is that it will look for the latest data on a subject, which is something that may take time to find in a Google search, and may be out of date on a knowledge database such as Wikipedia. So, users of Wolfram Alpha have the advantage of not having to click through multiple sites compared to Google as well as potentially having more recent data than Wikipedia.

One of the big questions is how Wolfram Alpha plans to make money. One potential answer is that because its tools are very effective at summarizing relevant data, many organizations may want to use it in their internal data warehouses, or to produce hybrid reports using internal and external data. Wolfram Alpha may charge for custom uses of the system such as this. Also, the site has posted its first banner ad, for Lenovo. Whether it will advance this model to include Google-style targeted ads based on the search terms remains to be seen.

Since Wolfram Alpha is a totally different type of tool, it will not likely compete directly with Google in the near future. It may become the go-to tool for finding simple, quantitative information about subjects that have publically available data on the web, but it will likely need to expand its language processing ability so that it can handle a greater range of questions for the general internet population to accept it. This could happen if the site is bought out by a bigger player, or if they receive a big investment by a believer in the technology. It will also be interesting to see if Google attempts to build similar functionality into their browser. They could be the greatest obstacle or enabler of Wolfram Alpha’s future.