Wolfram Alpha: Not a Google Killer but…

Recently the search world has been buzzing with anticipation about the launch of Wolfram Alpha, the newly hyped “computational knowledge engine”. The various self-proclaimed soothsayers of the search marketing world have variously described it as a “Google killer” or completely hopeless, but I think the balance is probably somewhere in between.

ReadWriteWeb released some screenshots showing Wolfram in action not too long ago. This is just one of them:

There is also a video from a webcast that Wolfram did on April 28th:

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. It is an automated answer service – you type a question, it tries its best to give you a good, precise and comprehensive answer to that query. This means that you won’t be searching around for information like “population of China”, you’ll be presented with stats and a nice graph showing historical trends in China’s population. It’s unlikely to replace Google for searches like “cheap printers”, “videos of beyonce knowles” or “photos of bangladesh”. It could however (if the hype becomes true) steal some market share for informational and research queries. At the moment Google doesn’t service these queries so well, and usually just dumps a Wikipedia page at top position.

I believe that Google probably aren’t shaking in their boots about this for the short term. Those informational queries are not the ones that advertisers usually want to buy, so its unlikely to significantly dent advertising revenue – Google’s bread and butter. But they’ll be watching very carefully, and probably already working on similar projects: Google will not want to let an imposter get their foot in the door, who can then expand onto their more profitable territory longer term. By the time Wolfram can do that Google will either have their own technology, or will have given their damnedest shot at a buyout.

So do Wolfram have a chance of success? Well recent history has shown us that predicted Google killers are usually a flop (see Cuil, for example), and Google certainly seems unsurpassable in its current glory. But you don’t have to look too far back to a time when the likes of Excite and Altavista held vast market share, until a smaller, smarter player came into the game. Google Search hasn’t changed fundamentally since launch – its got better, its got more comprehensive, and it serves verticals much more effectively – but its still all about links. Something a bit different, from a company that has such a strong track record in innovation, could be what the industry needs.

Wolfram Alpha is expected to launch to the public sometime this month.