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Some people will remember the early days of search with Lycos and Altavista and the like.  They may also remember the entrance of Yahoo! and how it brought categorized search that made a still young web easier to navigate.  It was a real attempt to categorize the web.  The story of Google and its automated, user driven categorization and ranking of the web is well known.  It worked for many reasons, but the biggest was the scalability of the approach.  Oh…and its genius for generating cash.   But that is another story.

This past Friday was another milestone in web data access.  Stephen Wolfram, the Mathematica founder, Physics Prodigy and pioneer in Complex Systems Research helped the web take a big step forward with the launch of Wolfram|Alpha.  What is it?  Ask it a fact based question and it will mine computable knowledge available on the web and provide the answer.  You can compare the GDP of Germany and Poland and it will provide the data in a line graph and trend line over time.  You would like to know the population of Laos compared to Vietnam.  Same thing.  Graphs, charts, other useful information is displayed.  How many weeks have passed since February 1969, a quick calculation.  The answer to differential equations.  It’s there.  I wish I had this back in school.  

Don’t get too excited.  It won’t answer subjective questions.  It is designed to provide factual information.  But what it provides is so much better than a search which returns links to documents.  Nova Spivak refers to Wolfram|Alpha as an “answer engine” and not a search engine.  As he says, it’s not a Google killer, it’s a new category altogether.  It doesn’t simply retrieve data or answer questions, W|A actually compiles fact-based data and presents it to the user in multiple formats including graphs, charts and tables.   Spivak’s articles on the topic are in-depth and thoughtful.  Check out one here: http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google

When you create a new subcategory of a well known space such as search engines, you are clearly acting with edge.  And if you spend a few minutes with W|A you will surely see an edge to it.  The use of social media as part of the otherwise quiet launch was a nice touch, but we clearly have an innovator here that is better at the product than the marketing.   Big launch or not, W|A is compelling.  Check it out at http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html.  

Steven Wolfram is a pioneer, but to date his celebrity has been mostly limited to an exclusive group of the math and physics communities.  Wolfram|Alpha is moving him to the mainstream.   Oh, one more point.  Another new category of web search with an edge will hit the street later this year.  I look forward to letting you in on that as well.

AwE