A new type of Internet Search Engine aiming to find and display answers to questions, rather than just a link to the most relevant Web site, has just gone online.

Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge engine, which is already creating quite a hype in the technology world, has been designed by the British physicist Stephen Wolfram and was released this week to the general public. It is located at Wolframalpha and it’s ready to search for answers to your questions. 

It works similarly like the computer in 2001: Space Odyssey or Star Trek, where you ask a question and the computer tells you the answer. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t include the voice (yet), but it searches all Web sites, databases, algorithms and computes the answers and displays it in the window. A regular search engine like Google or Yahoo searches through Web sites on the Internet and displays only the link to what it thinks is the most relevant site. Then you have to click on the link and keep looking for the answer on that Web site.

Wolfram alpha works much more efficient and faster. If it ever reaches its potential, it will be able to simply tell you/display the answer to any question. You won’t have to spend time clicking on links and searching for the answer yourself. It aims to catalogue “as much of World’s knowledge as possible” and find answers to every question imaginable. It’s still many years away from that sort of ‘power’ as its knowledge is still very limited. Whereas it can display answers to some obvious questions, like who is Bill Gates, or compute mathematical equations, it struggles with other types of questions. For example, you have to ask the right questions to get the right answer. You cannot ask for anything other than facts. You cannot ask for the best restaurant in New York, as there is no way of knowing this for a fact. There may be many great restaurants, but how should a computer know what’s the best food, service etc? It can only display test results from magazines and sources it finds on the Internet.

So, the system is still in early development stages, but is shows a lot of promise. I think this may revolutionize the way we look for information on the Internet in the near future. We shall hear more about Wolfram Alpha in the coming months and years.

Interested?  Head to Wolframalpha.com and test it yourself.

Source: News.com.au