WolframAlpha: Cuil it?
WolframAlpha launched today (a launch that was so well PR’d it would be worth working out who their agency is, they know their stuff obviously). So I’ll add some column inches to their growing coverage.
Firstly, I hope they don’t do a Cuil, for their sake. Cuil’s growth graph (sic) is below:
Secondly, they’re obviously not a search engine in the traditional sense. Putting them up against Google doesn’t actually mean much, as there is currently little comparision in what the two sites do. Their example searches (Eb major scale, Doppler shift 300Hz, 40gal primer) demonstrate that their target market (or at least the market they are likely to attract) isn’t the same – it’s a much smaller subset of scientific, mathematical or academic audiences. In addition, none (or few?) searches lead to any outside results. Wolfram is clearly trying to present “knowledge”, so perhaps in their eyes that’s the whole point – they are not actually a Google competitor at all.
Thirdly, there is a “Google can do this too” risk. Google does a great job of additional, simple, knowledge-based tasks. It knows that if you search for “25 GBP in USD” or “twenty five pounds in dollars” you want the value of 25 British pounds in US Dollars. Wolfram does the same, and if you wait a while, you get a historical graph and a table that for some reason shows you the UK pound against the Swiss France, Chinese Yuan and Norwegian Kroner (but nothing else). Then at the bottom of the page you get the following message:
That’s not a very mass-market friendly message – which I think sort of summarizes the WolframAlpha issue. It’s too rarified, and its neat tricks (some of which are, without a doubt, neat), are of appeal to a very small subsection of the market. Are they just really some other tools (like a dictionary, financial information and science facts) with a new front end? Cuil’s selling point (indexing more than Google) wasn’t a benefit to the mass-market either – and their search results didn’t compete in terms of usefulness (or user-friendliness) with Google.
For most “normal” searches, WolframAlpha responds with “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input David Tort Droid / 7 Eleven mp3 album “. Appart from the fact that most people won’t understand what “input” means in this context, this does mean most of the audience will switch off, and not come back. It’ll be interesting to see if WA can (or will) change quickly enough to keep the PR momentum going – or if it will become a niche provider to mathematicians, chemists and those who want some neatly-formatted knowledge from various sources, brought together in one site.
