Wolfram Alpha

I tried the wolfram alpha search engine (www.wolframalpha.com) this morning, and the marketing video was really cool - it blew me away. I used to do data analysis as a marketeer, and I understand what we can glean from structured data. But extending it to every structured data out there, providing a natural language interface and giving it away for free to the citizens of the world sounded like an incredible leap for the man-kind. 

I tried a couple of searches with Google & wolframalpha for population data (mobile phone penetraion in China), and wolframalpha won it hands-down.

Using goolge, I have to

• visit multiple sites before, 
• read through some junk, 
• kill some annoying pop-up ads, 
• scroll down to get to the information, and 
• finally interpreting what the author is trying to say

I tried a couple of searches that are tough to fit in a structured format (e.g: paracetamol dosage, flu incidence in US), and Google is much better here (wolframalpha turns up blank page for these queries).

On the negative side:

Wolfram still has to add lot more information to their database, and the natural language query is not very user-friendly. Lot of my queries turned blank pages on wolframalpha, and I found it difficult to create queries for simple questions.

Overall, wolframalpha introduces a great new way of looking at search algorithms - it is not sufficient to present all the webpages that match a particular string, but what is more useful is intrepreting these pages, collecting facts, analyzing them, building a database,  and presenting them in a useable format.

I really hope Google works on something similar, and integrates it with their current search. I feel Google can do a much better job at this given its strong financial resources, and vast data that they analyze.