Apr 26, 2009 2
Wolfram Alpha
I am excited to see what becomes of Wolfram Alpha since it has a lot of potential to help with simple to complex ready reference or computational type questions (where facts are involved). What I am really curious about is how users are going to know what they can do with the system. It sounds like it can do oh so much, but what would I use it for? When would I know to go to Alpha?
From the advance previews of the system (ReadWriteWeb, among others), it sounds like the results will be paired with traditional search engine results so if I am asking a subjective question such as, “What is the best restaurant in Chapel Hill?” it can return results more relevant to the query. It is going to offer massive amounts of curated data and presentation of your data results in contextually relevant ways. As they start to offer enterprise versions of the system, I imagine they will start to compete with products from companies like SAS. Also, will Google start doing something similar?
The system is getting a public demo with a live webinar this week at Harvard on April 26th at 3pm.