"I'm telling you, this company is getting hot . . ."
So began a pair of insistent emails from a friend and colleague about a company in the area I needed to check out. It turns out there's a Google-killer right down the road in Champaign, home to the University of Illinois and the start-up website,
Wolfram|Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com).
I say start-up "website" because this venture is the offspring of the 20+-year-old company Wolfram Research, which publishes the well-respected analytics software package Mathematica.
Though I am not a Mathematica user (like it, but I'm addicted to free), Wolfram|Alpha seems to be a web-based portal for accessing the Mathematica analytic engine and applying it to a large library of data. The interface is designed to take natural language queries and return results in a format that will span a presumed range of intentions and levels of sophistication of the user, as well as allowing for further drill-downs where appropriate. Hard to describe, so check out the easy-to-use site to get the drift.
The mission of the site/business is "making the world's knowledge computable". Bold mission, that, and appropriately so for a Google-killer (not that I've seen these guys calling themselves that).
This seems like a great concept, and it makes sense as a true leap ahead in what a "search engine" does. It will be interesting to see how it develops with more data and more users pointing it in unexpected directions.
