Managing Information on the Web, Wolfram-Style

While Steven Wolfram may not the most, um, orthodox figure in the scientific community (see, for example Steven Levy’s bio, or Cosma Shalizi’s review of the modestly-titled A New Kind of Science), I don’t think anyone doubts the usefulness of Mathematica and the various things associated with it (e.g. MathWorld and the Demonstrations Project). And now apparently his latest production – WolframAlpha, Wolfram’s new Mathematica-based search engine – will be released to the public this Monday. It looks quite interesting.

Finding useful information on the internet can be difficult and incredibly annoying, particularly for scientists or anyone in search of statistics of some sort. Google and Wikipedia, while useful, can often be inefficient or yield inadequate results. Many new search engines tailored to various interests seem to have emerged recently, but I am not aware of any current tools that satisfactorily tackle this particular (non-trivial) problem. One solution for anyone interested in biology is bionumbers, a searchable database of useful biological facts and data taken straight from the literature — but I think it’s quite clear that a more general and comprehensive solution (which WolframAlpha purports to be) would be very cool.

Judging from Wolfram’s promo video and reviews on pcworld, techreview and semantic universe, Alpha seems to be bionumbers made significantly more powerful and comprehensive. You probably won’t want to use it over google to find movie times or track your favorite celebrities’ lovelives; but you will want to use it to find various kinds of quantitative information: various metrics of the weather in Springfield, MA on the day David Ortiz was born, the location and sequence of some gene, the flowfield over a particular airfoil, the current position of the International Space Station, or data on blood cholesterol and potassium levels of middle-aged male smokers, for example. I look forward to pushing the limits of this tool, but it looks very useful.

Not be outmatched, Google recently announced plans to implement a similar kind of service using publicly-available data. I’m not sure when they will be releasing it, though, or how it will compare to WolframAlpha.