It is a fairly regular and predictable event now in the search industry. A new search engine product surfaces, the community gets worked up into a frenzy, we all hail the new Google killer and then it all goes away. Can a British offering fare any better?
Anyone remember Wikia, Cuil or Squidoo? While Cuil is by no means entirely out of the running, it has not gained the traction that some would have liked to see.
Now there is news of a new search engine from Britain all set to take its place in the semantic web. As reported at Guardian.co.uk a search engine called Wolfram Alpha is due for launch in May 2009. What is different about Wolfram is that it claims to use Natural Language Processing (NLP).
The majority of search engines use keyword search and match the search query to pages contained in a database, albeit using fairly sophisticated algorithms and filters. An NLP based search engine would allow the user to type in questions and receive answers in the form of a list of web pages that hopefully have the information the user is looking for.
NLP-based search engines are not new either, there have been more than a few. True Knowledge based in Cambridge UK, was launched into private beta in November 2007, Powerset was unveiled in September 2007 and Lexxe was founded in 2005, to name but a few.
So, can Wolfram be a Google killer? Unlikely in my opinion. The first hurdle is getting noticed. There are thousands (and that is a very conservative estimate) of search engines out there, many (if not most) of which are little fish all nipping away trying to get a bit of the market. Secondly, to even get close to Google, a company would have to have a budget big enough to take it on. Yahoo!, MSN and Ask all have spent a considerable amount on this very problem and have not really got very far.
However, as a business move, creating such a search engine could be good. After all, if the product is good enough it will attract attention. Powerset is a good example of this. On July 1, Microsoft signed an agreement to acquire it for a reported $100M.
I do not suppose for a moment that Stephen Wolfram is building a computational data engine with a new approach to knowledge extraction and an easy-to-use interface simply to sell it but, if his algorithm is really as good as is claimed, incorporating it into other engines can only be good for the user.
Tags: Google, wolfram alpha
pandora says:
July 23, 2010
to even get close to Google, a company would have to have a budget big enough to take it on. Yahoo!, MSN and Ask all have spent a considerable amount on this very problem and have not really got very far.