A search engine better than Google?

(this is a New Media Technology Exploration posting)

About a week ago I was checking my bookmarked websites for news stories of general interest and came across an article about the WolframAlpha search engine system that debuts this month. The new system is being touted by some as a quantum leap forward in search engine technology.

I am sometimes (often?) frustrated with Google -- my search inquires turn up an awful lot of irrelevant (and unreliable) material. I realize it's something of an art to get good search results. You have to understand Google's limitations and 'game' its system to get what you want. Still, you can waste a lot of time trying out different combinations of key search words.

The WolframAlpha system aims to weed out a lot of the chaff of search inquires. It searches for "curated" information -- material that has been assessed first by experts. According to an article in a British newspaper (The Independent) "The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out 'on the fly', according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out."

The New York Times says that traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo, by and large, excel at finding information that already exists online. If there are Web pages that include the words used in a query, the engines will find them and rank them in order of relevance. WolframAlpha is different. For starters, it does not gather data from the Web. Instead, its “knowledge base” is made up of reams and reams of data — ranging from the kinds of facts you would find in a World Almanac, to highly specialized data from physics and other sciences — that some 100 employees at Wolfram Research have gathered, verified and organized over several years.

A limitation to the Wolfram search engine however is its focus on quality information and not on frivolous popular culture topics. When the term "50 Cent" was submitted to the engine it confused a discussion on currency with the rap artist.

If WolframAlpha works as well as anticipated it could be a great blow to Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia that relies on entries by lay people as well as experts). Wikipedia's reputation for reliability has suffered in the past because information it passes on isn't always policed properly. WolframAlpha's strength is said to be in the quality of its sources.

The inventor of the new search engine, Stephen Wolfram, downplays the competition between his creation and Google. “I think WolframAlpha has the potential to be quite important,” he said. But he also said that the two search engines could just as well complement each other.