Wolfram’s search for better search results

Tuesday 10 March 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Tags: SEO

A new search engine – developed by Wolfram Research and brainchild of the British physicist Stephen Wolfram – will be launched in May. Branded WolframAlpha, the new engine is designed to use natural language in search. Coming fast on the heels of similar products such as Powerset, Hakia and Cuil, will WolframAlpha really offer anything different? And, if it does, will it be able to find a viable foothold in the shadow of Google and the other giants?

According to Stephen Wolfram, "I wasn't at all sure it was going to work. But I'm happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually managing to make it work."

Wolfram explains that much of human knowledge has been accumulated on the web but that it isn't as accessible as we would like. Existing search engines are very efficient in finding words and phrases amongst the billions of Internet pages but they find it difficult to answer new questions directly and succinctly. Today's engines rely too heavily on their vast databases of indexed pages, making best guesses based on search criteria to produce so-called relevant results. WolframAlpha is aiming to plug this gap by using the natural language that humans use – without even thinking – and getting computers to communicate in the same way.

This, however, is no mean task. Wolfram admits that getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be "incredibly difficult". However, he argues: "if one's already made knowledge computable, one doesn't need to do that kind of natural language understanding. All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do."

Will WolframAlpha become the byword for intuitive search? Only time will tell and we have to hold our breath until May. There's no doubting, however, the credentials of Wolfram himself. Eton- and Oxford-educated, he received his PhD in theoretical physics from California Institute of Technology at the age of 20. He is the creator of Mathematica – an application that helps the work of many scientists – and the author of A New Kind of Science (2002).

If WolframAlpha lives up to its hype, it will certainly keep the SEO specialists out of the pubs for a few months, as they struggle with its implications for their clients – but it's doubtful that Google is quaking in its boots!

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