Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Search Engine – Public Preview

Wolfram Alpha is a new type of search engine developed by a computer scientist called Stephen Wolfram. It’s being said it seems to be a different kind of search engine to Google – it’s a knowledge search engine (ask a question, and Wolf will give you an answer) — whereas with Google, you ask a question and you get a link to a “top ten list” of sites that *might* have what you need.

Those who have seen it in action seem to think it works and  ”could be a game changer” if not a Google Killer (although remember Cuil lol).

Wolfram Alpha will be launching in May to the rest of the world. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is hosting a webcast on Tuesday of the public preview with Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard in the US.

The sold-out Public Preview event will be streamed live on the web at 3PM EST 8pm British Summer Time this coming Tuesday. I’m looking forward to playing with it – though there are a few (including Danny Sulivan) at Search Engine Land who has a bee in his bonnet about the launch.

Update – 17 May – Wolfram Alpha Clearly Not A Search Engine! It’s nothing like Google.

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Written by Shaun Anderson

3 Responses to “Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Search Engine – Public Preview”

  1. Piggynap says:
    April 27, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    I can’t wait to play with Wolfram Alpha, not just because informational queries are something Google doesn’t do that well…It has an awesome name! Surely this is a search engine we could all be worshiping in a hundred years?

  2. Bob Sloan says:
    April 27, 2009 at 10:18 pm

    For sure it sounds very promising, and there is a lot of hype about it, but as Shaun says…..”Lets see”