Introduction to Wolfram Alpha by Stephen Wolfram

Wolfram Alpha is looking pretty stunning. But, it’s still going to trigger in a million simultaneous “WTF?” reactions when it launches later this month. Stephen Wolfram has tried to emphasise it as a very different tool from the search engines we already have, and he’s right. This new screencast hits it out of the park to make that clear.

I have a niggling sense that in the trend-based Web 2.0 scene, there’s trepidation about a cool new application that might not be for us; hence the need to incessantly compare to Google, perhaps in an attempt to undermine it with predictions of its limitations.

Wolfram Alpha is a limited, finite database of incredibly granular facts, compared to Google’s near-infinite crawl of web content (where the web is reasonably stated to be infinite; that is, 100% coverage of content will always lie beyond the capability of any one tool). But Alpha’s finite database is, clearly, still a huge database. Huge. Huge. And it’s somewhat mind-blowing to see the refined user experience for interacting with that data in action.

Human beings have to do manual work to add new data sources into Wolfram Alpha? I don’t care. It can’t allow you to interact with all the content on the web? I don’t care. It’s just a really big database? Well, duh.

Data + User Experience. This thing is new. And it’s going to be huge in schools.

The screencast is quite magnificent, you should watch it. As it goes on and example after example flies past, you start to get a real grasp of how powerful this is, and you’ll never misconstrue it as a ‘search engine’ again.

Whilst each query gets right to the point with accuracy, the surrounding information; the derivative and related data, is especially eye catching. Not always relevant, but generally fascinating. That’s a big deal. I think there’s a very good chance that’ll you find yourself drilling deep into Wolfram Alpha, exploring quirky data and strange facts in a very similar habit to Wikipedia. You know, the way you start out searching for the History of British Railways and end up three hours later reading about fictional technologies in the Stargate universe? (Actually, that’s only 4 clicks.) I think Wolfram Alpha is going to do that… with spreadsheets. We’re going to need a bigger brain. Via: wolframalpha.com.