WolframAlpha offers a new kind of search but...

BANGALORE, INDIA: Wolfram|Alpha, the much awaited high computational search engine has finally gone live on Monday. Though it has been touted as the Google killer, its founder Stephen Wolfram says it is not so (And an experimental search also confirms it is not!).

“Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people - spanning all professions and education levels,” says the site. “Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.”

Wolfram|Alpha is said to be the first-ever search engine which is equipped with question-answers system and gives analytical based results unlike search engines like Google which give search results based on the information over the Web.

The innovator of this search engine Stephen Wolfram calls it as “killer apps” of NKS (New Kind Science).

In the blog of Wolfram|Alpha, Stephen says, “There is an immensely complex web of systematizable knowledge out there in the world. And before NKS, I would have assumed that to handle something of this complexity would have required building a system that is somehow correspondingly complex - and in practice completely out of reach. But from NKS ) we have learned that even highly complex things can have their origins in simple rules and simple programs.”

And this is what inspired him to believe that building Wolfram|Alpha might be possible, said Stephen.

According to the website, Wolfram Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, it makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

However, if you thought it can throw up answer to any query, sorry this is not your cup of tea! It is basically a mathematics-oriented search engine. For example, if you ask 'Who was behind Rajiv Gandhi assassination?', with the expectation that it would answer Prabhakaran or at least the LTTE, it will say a big sorry with 'Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input' and give some details about his place of birth, date of birth and place of death and some link to Mahatma Gandhi. If that is not enough, it would interpret 'who' as the World Health Organization!. Enough!?

However, if asked about the weather in Delhi, it would give a graph of average temperatures, rainfall and other data, especially the geographical ones.

Also it can handle complicated mathematical queries, plot statistics and produce charts of natural events but don't expect it to be that intelligent to analyze and interpret your questions. It is a search engine that understands the language of the machine, and not the language of the man!