Wolfram Alpha could be useful for researchers

May 6, 2009 — 9:10am ET | By Ron Miller

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As more details emerge about the Wolfram Alpha search engine, I believe it will have its place in a broad searching tool kit, but it won't be a go-to search tool like Google. I say this without having actually used it, but I think I've read enough to understand at least what it does and what its purpose is.

According to a blog post in the New York Times called The Veil is Lifted From Wolfram Alpha, it is based on four key ingredients: "a massive amount of data, that [Mr. Wolfram's] company has collected from various sources; a computational engine built on top of Mathematica, one of Mr. Wolfram’s prior inventions; a system for understanding queries; and technology to display results in interesting ways."

The key pieces of information here are the data collection and the Mathematica engine. I have no doubt that Mathematica is a stunning piece of software, but the part that bothers me is the data collection--this means it's going to give you results based on collected data. I'm sure the data the team collected for its release is quite impressive, but the problem is that we live in a world of ever-increasing amounts of data, information that's growing and changing constantly.

It's impossible to keep up with it manually, which is why we have spiders that go out and find web pages because with an ever growing number of pages, it's impossible for a human team to track. I have my doubts that the Wolfram Alpha team will be able to keep that database current enough to be useful, but for the short term at least it will have great utility for researchers looking for specific data that's hard to find on the open web. Only time will tell if it can keep up in the long term and be viable.

For more information:
- see this Wolfram Alpha blog post on reactions from around the web.

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