Intelligent search engine Wolfram Alpha may redefine net search
10 Mar 2009
Have you ever thought that the answers that the web-based search engine throws up in response to your query are not exactly what you wanted? Ever wished that you could tell the search engine what exactly you are looking for but found the words lacking? Well, if everything goes as planned, May may see the launch of a new internet search engine so intuitive that it actually understands human language, and so powerful that one expert has suggested it "could be as important as Google".
This amazing new product, codenamed as ''Wolfram Alpha'', has been developed by British physicist Professor Stephen Wolfram. The new search engine would attempt to handle some of the shortcomings of contemporary internet search by comprehending searcher's questions and explicitly replying to them.
Wolfram quoted that though the existing search engines are good at organising the knowledge that has been created on the web, as users can extract texts and phrases from the billions of web pages, but they're unable to work out new things.
Along the same line, he wrote in his blog post, ''But we can't compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can't figure anything new out''.
According to Wolfram, his search site understands the users' queries, and presents the most suitable answers calculated using its extensive scientific and mathematical search engines.
Natural language processing - the ability to determine - has long been a holy grail for computer scientists, who believe for interacting with machines in an instinctive way. And that, says Wolfram, is part of the code that Alpha has cracked.