The Next Big Thing: Wolfram Alpha

By all accounts, Google is the best dang tooting search engine out there - period! But, of course, it's not the only one. There are always those, who, for one reason or another, will prefer rather to use Yahoo, MSN Search and the numerous other smaller search engines such as Viewzi , Excite, and whom have you?.

However, despite all of the claims, to the contrary, of some other search engine wannabes that they were just as good, or even better than Google, now comes a real honest-to-goodness challenger: Wolfram Reaserch .

Tonight, WolframAlpha, three days earlier than expected, is finally going live! Not only that, but they will also be featuring a live webcast of it's new system as it is being brought online as well! In the meantime, you can watch a quick demo Stephen Wolfram himself here.

All I can say is WOW! This looks really, really amazing and is something that your definitely going to want to check out for yourself. Rather than try to do justice to this new and exciting release, I will simply list two much more capable reviewers for your consideration.

First, is from Searchland.com who in an article titled, " The Wolfram Alpha "Fact Engine," says:

"......it won’t be a replacement for Google or a traditional search engine. But it looks like a promising new resource to gather all types of answers."

That's certainly true, Google, love em or hate em, are here to stay, but trust me, Wolfram is going to be big - very big and it's not something that is going to fade into the woodwork as many others have done so in the past! I think that Wolfram is about to become a very big thing, along side that of Google, and it's impact could be just as significant as that of Google itself!

The other review comes from the fine folks over at TechnologyReview.com, who illustrates Wolfram as being capable of doing the following:

"Let's say you want to know the caloric and nutritional information in a recipe you are making for your family. If you enter "2 cups flour, 2 eggs, 2 cups milk" in Wolfram Alpha, it will give you a nutrition label that reflects the combined values of those foods (after first prompting you to specify which of the several kinds of milk you are using). And if any normalizing of units was required, it will have done it already. If you enter similar search terms in Google, you will get a list of recipes and nutrition websites. Useful, to be sure, but it's up to you to scroll around to find the right data, and then break out the calculator. That's as good an example as any of the potential value of Wolfram Alpha, assuming the launch goes well. But that's not to say that Google won't tap the same U.S. Department of Agriculture databases and come up with something similar."

Wow! I don't know about you but that sounds absolutely amazing! And yes, even though it's being billed as being complementary to Google, it certainly will have some distinct advantages over Google in certain areas, and again, as Wolfram themselves point out:

"....... the new engine as something complementary to, and not in competition with, Google. (In short: Google uses elaborate means to find you the right Web pages, while Wolfram amasses databases and deploys myriad equations to compute answers for you.)"

Well, I don't know about you, but from what I have been reading I'm personally stoked - really, really stoked about this and I just can't bear to wait a minute longer for it to finally arrive.

Whether or not it lives up to it's potential, I honestly can't say. All I will say is that something tells me that this is for real - the real McCoy and that Wolfram Research is soon going to daily become a very real and big part of the way in which we all do research from here on out.

In conclusion, I certainly hope everything all goes as planned for Wolfram Alpha, and I heartedly welcome and wish them all of the best for what looks like will be a very successful upcoming launch and an even more exciting future.

And that's my 2 cents 4 this Friday, May 15, 2009