Do not search, find!

What, where, how and also when… all these questions have their answers only clicks away using search engines but could we get answers with less clicks?

When the web was young… it is still young but I mean younger… there were no search pages but directories of web sites like our old good Yahoo. It was good if you knew in which category you had to look, a bit like (or exactly like) the yellow pages (or whatever colour they might be in your country). It was not automatically updated but you had to submit your web site and wait for Yahoo to check it. Apart from few specialised directories, this model of “search engine” is not used anymore.

Then came Google… well not exactly, Altavista was first, it was the first engine to send a “crawler”, a little virtual robot jumping from website to website via links to index all the pages… Google started in 1998, four years later. Google success is in part due to Altavista failure, after being bought by Compaq, it was converted to a portal, that was the killer. Now altavista is owned by Yahoo, ironic, no?

So from 1999 to today (I am writing this in 2009, in case you are wondering) Google kept its number one ranking in the hall of fame of search engines… but in 10 years or so, have the results improved? You can say that you have more results but are they useful? After you have typed in your request and clicked “Google Search”, how many pages will you open before finding what you want? A lot, I know!

So NOW is when the future of search is starting, where you get what you are looking for, not a whole bunch of results to be sorted to find what you are looking for.

The future will hopefully look like WolframAlpha (WA). You have to know what you are looking for before using it and, as it is still at a beta stage, there are lots of things it can’t help you with. WA will compute the results and will give you what you are looking for and not links to pages where you might find what you are looking for.

Results for "ireland"

The simplest test is to try a country, for example “Ireland”. If you search for “Ireland” in google you would get 248,000,000 results, a lot to go through. The same search in WA will show you maps, will tell you how small it is (70,280 km²), how many people enjoyed its climate, even the GDP per capita! For all these details you can, obviously, know the sources to make sure how accurate and old they are.

It handles also very well any mathematical requests, from a simple calculation to more advanced formulas. It likes dates, do you want to know which day of the week you are born and how long it has been in days? Easy!

Are you on a diet? Yes, this is still related to the same subject, bear with me… Imagine your breakfast was 1 orange, 2 apples, 1 glass of milk and a slice of bread… how many calories is that? And fat? Well WA will tell you exactly: 414 calories and 4 g of fat.

Into music? How does A F D C# B A D sounds like? Not bad actually.

There are plenty of examples, per topics, on the web site for you to experiment.

It is not perfect and can’t replace Google just yet but can WA replace Google one day? It would take time and Google might try to beat them, they are still behind with their attempt but I am sure this is something they are working on to keep the #1.

One other big problem is the name, Wolfram Alpha is not as catchy as Google .

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