Wolfram Alpha

I tried Wolfram|Alpha today.

Color me unimpressed.

Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a new kind of search engine. It’s new, I suppose, in that it provides an unprecedented level of analysis of the data. You get charts, lots of them, and answers to questions you didn’t even ask.

Wolfram|Alpha is basically an analytics engine, built with Mathematica, sitting on top of a data warehouses. Data warehouses are not new; nor is the idea of extracting information from a data warehouse and running the data through some algorithms, or performing any other kind of data analytics. I am even sure that there are people who access their company’s data warehouse via Mathematica. Still, Mathematica is Wolfram|Alpha’s special sauce – it’s a robust, powerful tool that can do some pretty cool things. And they’re making select features available online, in a pretty logical extension to the Mathworld portfolio.

The point, however, is that the weakest part of Wolfram|Alpha is also its greatest challenge: the data warehouse. Wolfram|Alpha needs a tremendous amount of “facts”, because facts are what make the engine useful. But where do the facts come from? If there are multiple contradictory facts, which one do you choose? What level of quality control do you impose? And so on.

The question is whether or not one company can afford to amass a database like that, and then maintain it. The larger the database becomes, the larger the maintenance costs become. And, arguably, the less marginal value each additional piece of data has. Is there an alternative? The obvious one is Freebase; an open data repository. Of course, Wolfram|Alpha will probably import all that information – though I don’t want to be on the fact-checking team for that.

Wolfram|Alpha, no doubt, will do everything it can to build its database. It’s already announced a “Pro” version, which will allow users to “upload and download data from Alpha”. OK, but who precisely is going to take advantage of that? And: will the data that people upload mysteriously turn up publically?  Academics who have access to data should have access to Mathematica; and you can do a whole lot more in Mathematica. Unless people don’t want to do the work… which is entirely possible for, say, exploratory research.

Will it be successful? Quite possibly. But not, I think, likely; and hardly inevitable.