The first application to make use of Wolfram Alpha for e-books is the visually stunning iPad version of Theodore Gray's best-selling The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. The e-book application integrates Wolfram's computational knowledge engine closely into the e-book experience. It's easy to imagine calculus, engineering or geography textbooks that will also make use of Wolfram Alpha's vast data repository and its ability to manipulate this data. For now, the company is remaining relatively quiet about the exact details of the program, however. The full launch is scheduled to happen later in Q2 2010.

As Wolfram Alpha's managing director Barak Berkowitz noted yesterday, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This new e-books program is clearly another move in this direction.

Wolfram Alpha iPad App

Wolfram Alpha's newly affordable iPad app will make good use of the extra screen estate on the device. It will use a two-pane view, which looks like it will become a standard interface for many iPad apps. A sidebar on the right will feature your search history, examples and favorites, while the left side will display your results. We will take a closer look at the app once we can test it ourselves.

Earlier this year, Google also added data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division to its search results page. The queries that Google showcases in today's blog post (gdp of a country, internet users in the US or energy use in Iceland) are exactly the kind of queries where Wolfram Alpha excels. Currently, Bing doesn't display this kind of data from Wolfram Alpha and just focuses on math and nutrition, but a deeper integration between the two is just a matter of time.

Wolfram Alpha uses curated data sets - just like the World Bank or Census Bureau data - to compute its results. Google's current use of this data is less ambitious. Google wants to make public data more accessible - Wolfram Alpha wants to be a 'computational knowledge engine' that can manipulate these data sets.

Google Wants Your Public Data

One interesting aspect of today's blog post is that Google points out that there are "still many other data sets and sources out there, and we're excited about the possibilities for the future." Google also asks data publishers who are interested in making their data discoverable in Google to contact the company.

In the current implementation, Google can display results for the following types of questions:

CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.

On Twitter and in the tech blogosphere, the reactions to the app's price were anything but subtle. We called it "too expensive" ourselves, though others had stronger words for it. MIT's Technology Review called it a "a pricey online calculator for geeks" - a product that's more like the expensive but immensely powerful Mathematica than Stephen Wolfram's original idea for Alpha ("Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people").

It is worth noting that the Wolfram Alpha app quickly appeared in the list of top 100 grossing apps in the iTunes App Store (iTunes link) and has been hovering at the lower end of the top 50 ever since. That doesn't make it a breakout hit, but some people are clearly buying the app, even though only a small number of users have left reviews.

A Premium Price for a Premium Experience

There can be little doubt that the Wolfram Alpha team was expecting some backlash. As Porter told us today, the Wolfram Alpha team decided to price the app with the cost of a hardware graphing calculator in mind. At $50, the app costs roughly half of what a hardware calculator would cost. As Porter also stressed, the app offers a far superior range of features thanks to its connection to Wolfram's server farm. The company thinks this price is justified because of the superior experience of using the app over the mobile website.

After using the app for a few days, we definitely have to agree there. The dual-keyboard solution makes entering queries in the app much easier than using the mobile site and accessing Wolfram Alpha from the app is also much faster then using the mobile site.

Porter noted that Wolfram is trying to set itself off from the mass of $0.99 apps that only get used once and are quickly forgotten. Instead, the company hopes that the app will become a regular companion for its users, whether they are using it for help with their homework in school or college, or in their professional life.

At the end of the day, this is an app for specialists. While Schoeller Porter worded this more carefully in our interview today, the basic fact is that Wolfram is charging a premium price for a premium experience. Users who don't need the app can continue to use the website, while those who are willing and able to spend $50 on the app will get a superior experience. For the time being, Wolfram doesn't expect to bring the price of the app down and so far, according to Porter, the team has been happy and excited about how the app has been performing in the marketplace.

The Price of iPhone Apps

This also leads into a broader discussion about the current pricing in the iPhone App Store, where even the most complex apps and games have to sell for under $10 to reach a wide audience. At the end of our discussion, Porter noted that the Wolfram app may lead to some changes here, though we have to wonder if anything is likely to change the current drift towards lower prices in the App Store.

It is also worth pointing out, though, that a lower price point opens up the market for an app to a far wider audience - often to the point where the lower price brings in exponentially more users and more than offsets any potential losses from the lower price.

What Do You Think?

Is Wolfram's price point for the iPhone app a bold move? Hubris? Or would you be happy to pay $50 for the superior experience and ergonomics of the app?

One of the most interesting feature of the app, besides the ability to quickly access all of the power that Wolfram Alpha now offers, is the fact that the company has found a way to make inputing queries very easy. Instead of a single keyboard at the bottom of the screen, the app actually displays two keyboards - one for numbers and symbols, and a regular QWERTY keyboard at the bottom of the screen. Given the nature of a typical query for Alpha, this makes perfect sense and we hope that others will follow Alpha's lead here.

A Web-Connected Graphing Calculator, But With Some Limitations

It's important to note that the app only works when a user is connected to the Internet. This could be a deal-breaker for some, but then, the app store already offers plenty of basic graphing calculators for those times when you don't have Internet access. Thanks to its vast database of chemical compounds, nutritional data, geographical information, financial data, and its ability to solve pretty much any math problem that a high school or college student will ever encounter, the app can do a lot more than any current graphing calculator can offer.

For some students, though, the problem could be that some teachers won't allow them to bring a full-blown Internet-capable device like the iPhone or an iPod touch into an exam. In addition, it's also important to note that the Wolfram Alpha doesn't offer the ability to write programs inside the app, though maybe somebody else will build an app that can do this based on Alpha's newly released API.

It's also important to remember that Alpha isn't as easy to use as Google. Alpha, and, by extension, the app, can be rather strict about how you structure a query, for example. If you don't capitalize a chemical formula, the app won't know what to do with these symbols. While Google has virtually no learning curve, Alpha works best if you invest some time into exploring the intricacies of how to structure queries. To help you along the way, the app features a demo video, lots of example queries, and an FAQ section.

Native App Offers a Bit More Than the Web Service, But Is That Enough to Justify the High Price?

In its press materials, the Wolfram Alpha team stresses that the app offers a number of features that the web app can't currently offer. The app can now make assumptions based on your location, for example. Wolfram also has added quite a few features that make using the app easier than using the web service. You can easily bookmark queries and the app keeps a running list of recent searches available as well. In addition, you can easily email queries or share them on Twitter.

Is $50 Too Much?

At $49.99, there can be no doubt that Wolfram Research is pricing the app at the higher end of the spectrum. A spokesperson for Wolfram Alpha told us that the company wants to target the app at "serious users, and is priced as such." The team is clearly aware that this price could be controversial, especially given that the mobile web site offers a similar interface, though without the ergonomic benefits of the native app. In addition, Wolfram tells us that the team wants to use this price to make a statement about the "non-trivial nature" of Wolfram Alpha's capabilities.

While the company plans to offer regular discounts and sales, we can't help but wonder if the price isn't a bit too high. At $9.99 or even $19.99, the app would be more of an impulse buy, while now, even though it obviously offers more features than a user would ever expect from a high-priced hardware graphing calculator which would generally retail for more than $100.

Verdict

Wolfram Alpha launched to so much hype that a backlash was inevitable when it finally launched. As Schoeller Porter, the product manager for the iPhone app, notes, the company is also launching this app "as an opportunity to highlight how far the system has come since launch." Indeed, the Wolfram Alpha team continues to add new data sources and new ways to query them, making the service more useful with every new dataset it adds.

The high price will probably keep quite a few potential users from downloading the app, however. While we understand the company's rational behind this high price, users generally consider a $10 app to be a 'premium' product. $49.99 is a hefty price for this app, especially considering that the majority of features is available through the web service. If you are a student or engineer who really needs these features, though, the app is worth a look, but we recommend you try the web service and see how it works for the kinds of queries you would enter before you spend $50, especially given that the company will surely offer discounts or bring the base price down at some point.

Wolfram and his team will chronicle the launch in a live webcast on justin.tv, which will start at 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern tonight. We are not quite sure how Wolfram will manage the gradual launch over the weekend, though we assume that if you are on the preview waiting list, you will get first dibs.

Some Things to Keep in Mind

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you start experimenting with Alpha tonight or over the weekend:

• Wolfram Alpha is not a general purpose search engine - it does not directly compete with Google and if you treat it like Google, you will inevitably be disappointed.
• Check out the copious examples from the home page - they will give you a good idea of the type of queries that Alpha can handle best.
• Here is one thing we can almost guarantee: you will be disappointed at first (especially if you were expecting a Google killer).

  Alpha is a great tool, but it takes some time to learn its limits and strengths. Unlike Google, some searches simply don't return any results at all.

Using Alpha

Once you get access to Alpha, here are some tips for how to structure your searches and searches you should try:

• If Alpha doesn't give you the results you are looking for, try a different way of phrasing the query - sometimes even capitalization can make a difference!
• Try to search for anything that can be packed into data snippets (height of a mountain, chemical formulas, population stats, stars, planets, etc.) .
• Try combining two searches. Alpha usually does a great job with these kind of queries.
• Feed it some math problems. The fact that Alpha is based on Mathematica really shines through here.
• Do some test searches for food items or drugs.
• Let it solve some word puzzles for you. Just head to the "Words & Linguistics" section for some good examples.
• If you're a sports fan, look up some baseball or football stats: "passing touchdowns Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos."

Our Wolfram Alpha resources

Screenshots: See Wolfram Alpha in Action

Our Preview: Wolfram|Alpha: Our First Impressions

Wolfram|Alpha will be an amazing product, but it's quite different from Google and other search engines. Indeed, maybe it is actually wrong to call it a search engine at all (and Wolfram prefers to call itself a "computational knowledge engine"). If you wanted to know what sights to see on your next trip to New York City, for example, Alpha, from what we've seen so far, will not be able to help you.

Our Review: Mixed Emotions: Our First Hands-On Test Of Wolfram|Alpha

At the end of the day, Wolfram Alpha is a tool; and once you take some time to learn its ways, it can become a very powerful tool. While a lot of media outlets have compared Alpha to Google, we think that this is a moot question. Alpha simply doesn't want to be a Google killer and, in its current form, won't take market share away from Google. As we reported in our first look at Alpha a few weeks ago, Alpha will take away some users from Wikipedia (but it's no Wikipedia killer either), as it can give those users quick and easy access to a wide range of data.

For now, we expect Alpha to remain a niche player. It will be a highly valuable tool for a small subset of potential users. Though, hopefully, over time the team will add more and better databases to draw information from so that Alpha will become more useful to a mainstream audience as well.

Videos

Stephen Wolfram's screencast demo of Alpha.

First Public Demo of Wolfram Alpha at the Berkman Center:

Stephen Wolfram and colleagues discuss the launch preparations:

Setting up the Wolfram Alpha data center (one of five W|A data centers):

Other Wolfram Alpha Reviews

Technology Review (compares Alpha to Google):

Generally, I did not use search terms that clearly had no computable answer (and therefore would have stumped Wolfram). But I also didn't throw any softballs in areas close to the heart of its makers: physics, chemistry, engineering, and genomics. On hard-core scientific questions, it gives you tons of symbols and graphics and other information that would be useful to a researcher but obscure to most people. But on many common questions for which there is no obvious data element, you will not get much help. In any event, if its plans hold, you should be able to test it out yourself in two or three weeks.

Search Engine Land (very in-depth look):

Wolfram Alpha's edge may be that it's a unique repository of general knowledge that imitates a search engine (unlike Wikipedia, which has no search engine feel). Of course, the killer combination would be for Wolfram Alpha to be partnered with a major search engine. It's something Wolfram said is being considered, though there are no formal discussions at the moment. The focus is really getting the service opened to the public and seeing how the initial reaction goes.

Telegraph:

How many times have you used to the internet to calculate the answer to a simple mathematical problem, for help with calculus, or for information on the GDP of Gibraltar? If the answer's, "not often", then it's going to be quite some time before Wolfram Alpha crops up as your search engine of choice.

What Will You Ask?

If you are looking forward to the launch of Wolfram Alpha, let us know what questions you want to ask in the comments. We'll try to answer the most interesting questions (try to give us specific queries!) with links to screenshots from the Wolfram Alpha preview in the comments until about 3pm PST today.

Let's get this out of the way quickly: Wolfram Alpha is not (yet?) geared towards mainstream Internet users, who, for the most part, are still better served by Google. Of course, comparing Alpha to Google isn't even fair, but most users will treat it like Google, and will most likely come away sorely disappointed. Instead, Alpha, for now, is going to be a great tool for students, engineers, and academics - and anybody who needs data quickly and knows how to interpret it. It takes some time to learn how to best use Alpha, and it still has its rough patches, but, overall, we have come away quite impressed, though, at times we were also frustrated.

One thing to keep in mind about Alpha is that it will give you data - but it will not supply meaning. Users have to interpret the data themselves.

Results: Great in Some Areas - Very Limited in Others

Sometimes, Alpha's data set can also be uneven. You can, for example, get unemployment data for states, but if you want to drill down to specific cities, Alpha has to pass. Alpha can also answer odd trivia questions like "wingspan B-29 Superfortress" (141' 2.882"), how many pharmacists there are in the U.S. (and their median wage), or how much money "The Wrath of Khan" made at the box office (including, oddly enough, the conversion of those $78.91 million into Japanese yen, British pounds, and euros).

It can also do impressive calculations (though some of our more complex queries timed out), draw a Sierpinski gasket for you, or tell you what a safe heart rate for exercising is when you are 25yrs old. But while it knows who the German president was in 1984, it refused to tell us who the German chancellor was in that year. And the only info about World War I or II we got were basic dates, but at the same time, Alpha can tell us how many people die per minute in Germany today (1.698) and compare that to current birth rates. Alpha can also give you nutritional information, but we weren't able to figure out how to scale this data to different weights.

Some Humor

Sometimes, some humor also shines through in the search results. When you look for "5 kilo," for example the results will give you basic conversions, but Alpha will also tell you that 5 kilo is roughly equivalent to the weight of 2 copies of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

Limits

Clearly, there are holes in Alpha's data set. And most of these holes are in non-technical areas which, in many ways, is understandable as it would be harder to make that kind of information parsable for a system like Wolfram Alpha (though Alpha is great at solving word puzzles and anagrams). Thankfully, Alpha ads link relevant Wikipedia articles to every results page.

Lack of Interactivity

At times, there is also a lack of interactivity that can quickly become frustrating. All the images on Alpha are just static images, for example, which means that you can't zoom in or out of a map. Or, when you search for biographical data, none of the information is linked, so that you can't just click on a person's birthplace to get more information. This means that really drilling down into a subject can be hard as you constantly have to type in new queries.

Capitalization Matters

Alpha can also be extremely finicky. When we typed in 'pdx,' it didn't know what to do with it, but when the query was capitalized it returned both information for Pursuit Dynamics, which uses PDX as its trade symbol, and the option to get info about Portland International Airport, which was the information we were actually looking for. While Google is completely agnostic when it comes to capitalization, Alpha obviously cares (maybe that is also the legacy of a complex tool like Mathematica that is the foundation of Alpha).

Alpha provides new users with an extensive set of sample queries (all of which, of course, work great). To get the most out of Alpha, it really helps to look at those to see how to best formulate your queries.

Alpha For Developers

Alpha is going to have an extensive API for third-party developers. We only had a quick look at the documents that are aimed at developers, but from what we can see, developers will pretty much get full access to Wolfram Alpha's datasets. It should be interesting to see how the developer community manages to mash this data up with other sources to even out some of the areas where Alpha doesn't quite shine yet.

A Great Tool - But Not for Everybody

At the end of the day, Wolfram Alpha is a tool - and once you take some time to learn its ways - it can become a very powerful tool. While a lot of media outlets have compared Alpha to Google, we think that this is a moot question. Alpha simply doesn't want to be a Google killer and, in its current form, won't take market-share away from Google. As we reported in our first look at Alpha a few weeks ago, Alpha will take away some users from Wikipedia (but it's no Wikipedia killer either), as it can give its users quick and easy access to a wide range of data.

Alpha's biggest problem, right now, is interpreting search queries. Too often, a minor change in a query can mean the difference between no result, and finding exactly what you are looking for.

We also hope that Wolfram will find a way to link more of the data and search results together. It is rather frustrating when you find something interesting in your search results, only to have to type yet another query, even though a simple click should suffice.

Great for Engineers - Not For the Mainstream

For now, we expect Alpha to remain a niche player. It will be a highly valuable tool for a small subset of potential users. Though, hopefully, over time the team will add more and better databases to draw information from so that Alpha will become more useful for a mainstream audience as well.

Note: If you would like to see more screenshots of Wolfram Alpha in action, you can find them here.

When we got the demo, Wolfram asked us to refrain from publishing any screenshots. Today, however, the Berkman Center posted a video of the public demo Wolfram gave earlier this week, so we think it's only fair that we share our own screenshots with our readers at this point.

Query #1: internet users in Europe

Query #2: weather oakland

Query #3: oakland

Query #4: uncle's uncle's brother's son

Query #5: water 550C 3 atm

Query #6: integrate x^3 sin^2 x dx

Query #7: bob

Example of a copy and paste dialog:

Embedding Search Results:

Here is the video of the public demo at the Berkman Center. It is a bit blurry, but it does show Wolfram Alpha in action:

And if you really want a look behind the scenes, here is a look behind the scenes of the Wolfram Alpha datacenter:

Update 4/30: We just posted our screenshots here.

Alpha, which will go live within the next few weeks, is quite different from Google and really doesn't directly compete with it at all. Instead of searching the web for info, Alpha is built around a vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources. Alpha then organizes and computes this knowledge with the help of sophisticated Natural Language Processing algorithms. Users can ask Alpha any kind of question, which can be constructed just like a Google search (think: "hurricane bob" or "carbon steel strength").

In today's demo, for example, Stephen Wolfram searched for "internet users in europe," or "weather oakland" - two queries that most users would also use in Google or any other search engine.

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its "search" results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don't even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case).

Alpha, of course, doesn't hide its relationship with Mathematica. Indeed, according to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).

Alpha can handle a lot of the mathematical questions that Mathematica can compute today (think: "integrate x^3 sin^2 x dx"), but every query will only run for a few seconds, so really complex queries will inevitable time out. Mathematica, however, will also be one of the first programs to make use of the Alpha API, so that Mathematica users will be able to access Alpha's repository of data.

Alpha also has a sophisticated knowledge of physics and chemistry data, and during today's demo, we also saw examples for nutritional information, weather, and census data. Most of the data in the system is curated, but real-time financial data or weather information will go through a system that checks the data for validity, so that outliers can be identified as potentially faulty information.

Pro Version

Alpha will come in a free version, but there will also be a paid version, which will allow users to download and upload data to Alpha. Stephen Wolfram did not go into too much detail, including pricing, but pro users will, for example, be able to not just see a graph, but also download the data behind this graph for use on their own machines or in Mathematica.

Embedding and Alerts

Wolfram is clearly taking a page from the modern Internet playbook and will allow users to embed not just a Wolfram|Alpha search box on their own pages, but they will also be able to embed results and a custom Alpha portal on their own sites. Users will also be able to receive email alerts when a result changes.

A Few More Random Notes

• every search results page on Alpha will feature a link to the sources it used to compute the results
• when a fact is disputed, Alpha will note this in a footnote
• Alpha will only be in English for now - Wolfram notes that this was already a very hard task and that the company does not currently have the resources to replicate its natural language processing techniques for other languages
• money: alpha will feature ads in a sidebar, but Wolfram will also partner with other corporate entities. He didn't go into any details, but it sounded like these corporate partnerships might include other search engines.
• Wolfram will release toolbars for FF and IE, as well as an IE8 accelerator
• Alpha will also display results from traditional search engines (Google, Live, Yahoo) and will feature links to relevant Wikipedia articles

Will it Kill Google?

No. Wolfram|Alpha will be an amazing product, but it's quite different from Google and other search engines. Indeed, maybe it is actually wrong to call it a search engine at all (and Wolfram prefers to call it a "computational knowledge engine"). If you wanted to know what sights to see on your next trip to New York City, for example, Alpha, from what we've seen so for, will not be able to help you.

Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.

Today's demo mostly focused on math and engineering data, so we'll still have to wait and see how Alpha copes with questions about historical events, for example.

Every product, of course, looks good in a controlled demo (though Stephen Wolfram also happily entertained questions from the audience for almost an hour), and we will have to wait and see how well Alpha performs when faces with real questions from real users. Based on what we've seen today though, it seems rather unlikely that Alpha will be the next Cuil.