Hype killer
There's been a reasonable amount of buzz surrounding a new website called Wolfram Alpha, which officially launched today. It calls itself a "computational knowledge engine" and, such is the desire for hyperbole in the world of headline writing, has been called both a ‘Google Killer' and a ‘Wikipedia Killer'.
While neither of these claims are likely to prove true, they do give us an indication where it sits in the great scheme of things. It's not a search engine because it's not designed to find web pages relevant to a search term. What it seems to specialise in is offering up data associated the query.
It will answer questions like "capital of peru", but it will give you a bunch of other, mainly statistical information on it as well as web links and a link to the Google search for the query.
The eponymous founder of Wolfram Alpha - Stephen Wolfram - offers you a guided tour to the project here. We would like to hear your first impressions of Wolfram Alpha and its possible impact on existing web search engines and knowledge bases in the HEXUS.community discussion forums.
