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.

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.