Wolfram Alpha
This is absolutely incredible. Wolfram Alpha is a “knowledge engine” launching this month. It’s being dubbed a Google killer and even though its’ creator says it isn’t, it’s getting tonnes of (deserved) attention.
Check out this screencast posted last week to see Stephen Wolfram take Wolfram Alpha for a little test drive and show off what it can do.
Ok, fine… it probably won’t *kill* Google, but considering that people are turning to Google more and more to look up dinky facts and definitions because it’s such a damn good search engine, Wolfram Alpha stands a good chance of biting a serious chunk out of Google’s mind share when it comes to settling useless trivia disputes.
This is such a totally fresh and radical approach to using the internet — I can’t imagine this not having a massive impact on the everyday user in the next 3-5 years.
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I’m not going to pretend this isn’t awesome, because the whole thing is very impressive. However the screencast rather misrepresents the current state of the project, using handpicked examples (I’m sure I would have done the same thing). From my last 30 minutes of playing with it since it when live, I’ve had plenty of “WolframAlpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”.
But if they keep adding more databases, and better logic, then it has a bright future. Here’s hoping. But for now it just kind of reminds me of the Segway…