Wolfram Alpha: The Google rival that aims to dig deeper

Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram publicly debuted his company's forthcoming online "computational knowledge engine" on Tuesday.

The Wolfram Alpha engine is a web service designed to process data from controlled, vetted sources of data - many not on the web - then present the results in a way that lets people dig deeper into the subject. It's something of a cross between a graphing calculator, repositories of scientific data, and a system to interpret questions posed in human terms.

In a talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Wolfram said: "Like interacting with an expert, it'll understand what you're talking about, do the computation, and present the results in such a way you'll be able to understand what the consequences are."

For example, people can ask about the molecular weight of caffeine, about the location of a gene in the human genome, the number of people named Andrew born in a particular year, the life expectancy of 40-year-olds, and the performance of Microsoft stock - and then dig into the results. The height of Mount Everest can be expressed in terms of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Alpha site will be publicly available "in a few weeks", with free access to all users supported by sponsors and subscriptions for heavy-duty users who want the system to process their own data, Wolfram said.

Alpha has four main components, Wolfram said.

Data curation Wolfram Alpha uses public and licensed proprietary data sources, and the company uses automated processes and human choices to prepare the data. "At some point you need a human domain expert in front of it," Wolfram said.

Algorithms Alpha must pick the right computational processes to present its results. "Inside Wolfram Alpha are five million to six million lines of Mathematica code that implement all those methods and models," he said.

Linguistic analysis - to understand what a person typed. "I thought one of many things that could have gone wrong was that short, lazy things would [have] huge amounts of ambiguity," for example figuring out whether "50 cent" had to do with musical artists or money. "That turned out to be not nearly as much of a problem as we expected."

Presentation "There are tens of thousands of possible graphs. What do you want to show people?" Wolfram asked.

Wolfram hopes the tool will help researchers perform scientific chores that before were possible but not necessarily worth their time.

"What's the angle of sun at particular moment? Given 20 minutes, I could compute it and get it right, but I probably wouldn't bother," Wolfram said. "What Wolfram Alpha does is take that piece of scientific knowledge and make it immediately accessible to everybody."

But another similar service was also made available yesterday: a Google feature that can search public data and present the results graphically.

Ola Rosling, product manager at Google, said of the service in a blog post: "We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data.

"The data we're including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers' salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on."

The service is based on Google's 2007 acquisition of Trendalyzer, Rosling said.

One example: "When comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara's peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate," he said.

Google didn't immediately comment about whether the timing of its launch was coincidental, and Wolfram Research didn't immediately comment on the Google product.

Original article: Google crashes Wolfram Alpha debut party from CNET News.com