Is Wolfram Alpha the next big search engine or a lot of hype?

Another year and another big search engine announcement. This time it's from Stephen Wolfram, whose claim to fame is the Mathematica, math software. This one--at least according the the hype that's squeezing out all over the place--is supposed to be the next "Google killer" to come down the pike. According to this Fast Company blog post, the new search tool, dubbed Wolfram Alpha, is supposed to be a true natural language query search engine built using Wolfram's tools Mathematica and NKS.

Wolfram himself described it in his own blog post last week:

"I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work".

But as my DaniWeb colleague Davey Winder pointed out in his post on his Inside Edge blog, those of us who follow search will recall that Cuil was greeted with a similar level of hype. (We covered it in July when it launched.) It had the killer algorithms and it had the hype machine in full gear. And even though Cuil came into the world with such promise, it disappeared into total irrelevance within months of the launch.

It's hard to say if the Wolfram search tool will fare any better. Certainly there appear to be some very smart people behind this project, but it's going to take more than smarts to knock Google off its pedestal at this point. The description is cryptic at best--maybe a mind like Wolfram simply can't communicate on a level mere mortals can understand.

Nonetheless, I can't wait to see what it looks like and how it behaves in real world searches. For now, you can go to the website and see a simple (Google-like) search box with a promise for more to come in May. For those of you who might be curious as I am to find out if this is more of the same or something completely different, you can sign up and find out.

For more information:
- visit Stephen Wolfram's blog post
- the Wolfram Alpha web site
- the Fast Company post

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