Wolfram Alpha (The Good, The Bad or The Ugly ? )

A few days ago another internet search engine named Wolfram Alpha was officially launched. It was the hottest topic in my friends circle and amongst my batch mates . People were spamming and filling each others mail box. Their main queries were, will this search engine survive in front of a giant like Google? or will this search engine produce better results than Google? Did they implement semantic search? Etc.

I used it for a few hours and found some good and some bad results. I also compared it’s search results with Google. I will explain all of this and more in the latter part of this post. But the thing that interests me the most is Wolfram's profile.

Stephen Wolfram, a British prodigy who earned his PhD in Physics at the tender age of 20 . He published an article on particle physics at the age of 16 and entered Oxford University at the age of 17. He wrote a widely-cited paper on heavy quark production at the age of 17. This same person made a calculation and graphing software package called Mathematica, the only fully integrated technical computing software. No doubt he is a genius but we are here to explore Wolfram Alpha.

Is Wolfram Alpha a search engine?
Search engine is a tool which enables one to find what he is looking for on the Web. For example if you search "geekonnet" on google or on other search engines, it gives all the websites where "geekonnet" is present. If we search the same query on Wolfram Alpha it gives information about geekonnet like daily page views, domain information etc. The site's best trick is its ability to make calculations for certain types of queries. It tries to dissect a question into its components and then performs calculations using its own source materials to compute an answer. The results are presented as a sleek collage of tables, charts and graphics.

It would be unfair if we call wolfram alpha a search engine. Wolfram Alpha is a "computational knowledge engine." In simple word a " question answering system". It is interesting to know that whatever result you get on Wolfram Alpha you can also get the same result on google within 3 to 4 searched result links.

Some facts about Wolfarm Alpha:

1. Wofram Alpha's page is 18 times havier than google's home page: I compared the size and dowloading times of wolfram alpha and google on www.websiteoptimization.com . I found that the homepage Wolfram Alpha is 18 times heavier than Google's home page. The size of Google's home page is 14.449 KB with only 4 HTTP requests. But I found that the homepage of Wolfram Alpha is struggling with a size of 257.411 KB along with 37 HTTP requests. Google page takes only 3.75 seconds to load on a 56Kbps modem. whereas Wolfram Alpha takes 59.93 seconds to load on the same 56Kbps modem.
   No doubt wolfram Alpha needs a huge website optimization.
   
2. Wolfram Alpha is built using Mathmetica: Wolfram Alpha is built primarily using Mathematica; it contains 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code.

In short Wolfram alpha acts like a nerdy accountant who is equipped with the latest set of calculators and endless stacks of books and encyclopedias. Wolfram Alpha is completely useless for me. I don't think I will ever use it. But I am not entirely happy with Google. Google still uses the same old search algorithm based on page rank and key words. If any Google guy is reading this post, here is a question for you : When will you implement semantic search in Google?

PS: Dear readers please write your views and experiences about Wolfram Alpha as comments to this post.

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