Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine.

Glad to see that someone is taking up the challenge of a serious competitor to Google’s search/find system. Wolfram Alpha, has the chance.

As I understand it, this is a dimple divergence from ask/find to ask/compute. Whats the difference? Well thinking on a very reductionist level, Google is a pretty dumb system – it follows some rules that are pre-determined by humans and then spits out a result based on those fixed rules (although they change over time manually, they are still fixed at the point of query). Wolfram takes a different approach, you set the rules at the point of query, or create the computation in real time, based on data that WA holds.

Take for example, if you wanted to know how much stock had fallen and risen over the last 2 years in the UK FTSE market. You could visit google finance, take a look at the graph and that would tell you. Simple, you say, so whats the advantage? Well there is none until, lets say you wanted to know how much farming stock in particular over a given area of the UK  had fallen and risen over that last 2 years, then that would rely on someone manually processing that, publishing a page, Google visiting that page and Google crawling that answer, storing it, giving it relevancy etc etc…. All that, when all you need is the answer to a data problem, not a relevancy one. WA however uses the ‘data’ available to compute the result, thus skipping every other step that Google (or search engines in general) might take.

An Answer Engine.

The benefit (which is what’s important here) is that we can create new data from old data, we can generate exponentially answers based on answers. In a world of jumbled data, human error, we can redistribute, recompute and ultimately collectively discover more than any single entity can in the same period.

Time

This is the critical factor (there are many other critical factors, but time the most important of the lot), as it’s saving the time taken to compute the same things, over and over again, making each of the trillions and trillions of data units the internet holds, n times more efficient.

As a basis for a knowledge system, it really is inspiring.