When it was first unveiled in March, Wolfram Alpha, a new type of search engine created by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, got a lot of buzz. Naturally, some people threw out the “Google killer” title — but it seems to be a different beast, as it’s all about knowledge search. That is to say, you ask a question, and you get an answer — with Google, you ask a question and you get a link to a bunch of documents. That may sound a bit bland, and simplistic, but the select few who have seen it, seem to think it works really well and could be a game changer.
The rest of us won’t know for sure until May, when it’s scheduled to launch. But if you want to catch a glimpse of how it will work, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is hosting a webcast on Tuesday of an event with Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard. The sold-out event will be streamed live on the web at 3PM EST this coming Tuesday on this page.
And Harvard is calling for web users to participate in the preview by submitting questions, by @replying or direct messaging BerkmanCenter on Twitter during the event, or joining their IRC chat.
I’m surprised this wasn’t a twitter post
I am very keen to see this in action. After disappointments with new search engines like cuil and powerset, I will be reserving my judgment until I see it in action.
My sense is that the best non-Google search engine to come out so far is http://www.yauba.com, so I will be curious to see how this compares with Yauba.
Oh come on. You gotta be kidding me. Yauba???
Stop schilling.
This reminds me of Steorn Orbo. All hype, no substance.
cough cuil
with this much hype… i won’t be surprised if this becomes overrated.
Its really good to know that now we ‘ll be having another choice for searching the stuff, hoping this new search engine can give away something really different as its been claiming.
This is going to be explosive.
I’m waiting on their competitor “Dollhouse Heart”
Aw man, that should be “Hart” not “Heart”
worst domain ever…
Disagree. The worst domain name ever is this one: hibbity-hibbity-bop-du-bippity.org.
Hopefully they dont drink the Cuil-Aid.
omg c what i did thar!!11111oneononeeleven
if it is about semantic web, then the whole thing would definitely make sense. even to google…
cheers,
marvin
It seems like a lot of people almost want it to be hype and another cuil. There hasn’t exactly been a lot of innovation lately on the web. This site talks about Facebook, Twitter and iphone apps, and that’s about it these days. Wolfram may be an egomaniac, but I still am hoping this is something real. It would be nice to see something game-changing.
I don’t want it to be another Cuil. I want it to actually work. The web has become such a cluster of irrelevent search results that there ENTIRE TEAMS ONLY EXIST to get people to know that your site even exists. The web needs a better way to organize its content.
From what I understand, this will not solve the web content organization problem.
If this engine is designed to answer questions, it is quite different from a search engine imho.
I still don’t understand if it will actually try to *generate* answers from information available on the web…
I really hope it lives up to its hype.
hibbity-hibbity-bop-du-bippity.org
Doesn’t exist, so it doesn’t count as the worst or best or anything.
(btw, has anybody got the joke about the email I “use” – just think 007, then you will get it)
If Wolfram can’t get along without using OLD verions of JRE in his other programs, then how are we to get excited by this?
If it’s adopted en mass, where will this leave hunch or the likes of Yahoo Answers? or even the much vaunted Cha-Cha?
Explosive ….. make it clear
Wolfram can count one of the Google founders as an ex-employee:
http://infolab....gey/resume.html
These guys have been doing interesting things for a long time…I’m not writing this off on the eve of what could perhaps be a relatively big thing.
From what I understand, this will not solve the web content organization problem.The web has become such a cluster of irrelevant search results that there entire team only exist to get people to know that your site even exists. The web needs a better way to organize its content.
Is the feed totally overloaded? It looks like it to me.
This one is working: http://bigthink...ram-alpha-debut
I’m expected something about twizer damn…=)