The word Google entered the language as a
verb some years ago, even as the company became an icon of IT success stories.
But what does Google really do? It finds documents. When most of us perform a
Web search, what we’re ultimately looking for is answers, and Google is not designed
to answer the types of questions we ask, such as, “What did Edgar Allen Poe die
of?” or “What’s the economy of Brainerd, Minnesota, based on?”
However, that’s all about to change. As
explained in a recent article posted on the Web site Twine.com, Stephen
Wolfram, a British mathematician, physicist, and recipient of the MacArthur
“genius award,” is about to release what’s being called a “computational
knowledge engine.” With it, you can ask a question using ordinary English language,
such as, “How many bones are there in the human body?” and get a straight
answer instead of a lot of documents that you then have to search manually.
The system, called Wolfram|Alpha, is
notable because it doesn’t simply contain a lot of diverse information, like
Wikipedia. It is a computational engine that computes the answer. According
to an article on ZDNet.com,1 for example, if you ask Google to tell you what the price of oil was on
February 3, 2007, you get 19 million hits. Not very straightforward. That’s
because finding everything is the same as finding nothing.
Instead of a needle, you get an even larger haystack.
However in a recent trial, users asked
Alpha questions like, “How many Internet users are there in Europe?” While Google
might provide the documents that give that answer, Alpha showed not just the
number of users, but also ways of plotting various types of data for every
country in the world.
Another question presented to Alpha
concerned how a person was related to his “uncle’s uncle’s brother’s son.” The
answer from Google was completely meaningless. But Alpha generated an
interactive genealogy tree that included such things as the fraction of
relationship by blood with various relatives along the tree.
According to Wolframalpha.com, the tool’s
official Web site, the computation engine takes all the data on the Web...
