Wolfram|Alpha expands its initial offering with Xignite

When Wolfram|Alpha debuted last spring, I wrote in "Wolfram Alpha doesn't impress me" that the initial offering was limited by what the engineers had placed in the database. As I wrote, the search engine could answer the question, "How many roads must man walk down before you call him a man?" because the engineers who populated the database were Bob Dylan fans. If you searched for answers to other musical questions, you might be out of luck.

That's why it's so interesting that Wolfram|Alpha has partnered with Xignite, a web service that provides the search engine with real-time financial data. That means that instead of relying on the information that's in the original database or working constantly to update it--a fight they very likely would lose--the service provides updated information to Wolfram|Alpha automatically thereby providing a constant stream of fresh data.

Xignite provides Wolfram|Alpha with real-time and historical stock prices, market indices, interest rates, currency exchange rates and various economic statistics to power the majority of the market, financial and company information delivered in its search results. Peter Overmann, executive director of research and development at Wolfram Research, Inc. says that the partnership with Xignite is just a starting point and the company plans to expand its real-time database coverage to other areas beyond finance. "Wolfram|Alpha's goal is to be the single source for definitive answers to factual queries, and we rely on acquiring and processing data in a vast number of areas," Overmann said.

If Wolfram|Alpha can successfully incorporate other types of data that updates automatically in the same fashion as Xignite, it could make it a much more useful tool and one which, while not a Google killer per se, will prove useful to researchers across a variety of niches looking for quality answers to specific types of queries.

For more information:
- see the Wolfram|Alpha-Xignite press release

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