Bretts Marketing Bytes

Will the internet be the next artificial life form? Not quite, but it is looking like the new search engine, Wolfram Alpha to be released later this month is the closest that computer technology has ever come to being human.

What makes Wolfram Alpha so special? Well quite honestly the proof will be in the pudding, but so far the idea sounds like it could change the way we use the internet forever.

Wolfram Alpha recognizes human questions and spits back relevant data and also a neat page of related information. The beauty of this search tool is that it can calculate and compute things on the fly. For example, you could say, “life expectancy, male in Italy , 19th century compared to 20th century.” It will bring up distributions of life expectancy and also a comparison of the two centuries.

“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.”

Google has brought us great strides in search, but when you start learning about how it works on an esoteric level like I do,  you begin to realize how primitive it really is.  I personally believe Wolfram Alpha will be a step in the right direction toward future search and I am looking forward to checking it out first hand.

See a demo here.

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