When a free Web service called WolframAlpha launches in the coming days, the general public will get to try a “computational knowledge engine” that has had technology insiders buzzing because of its oracle-like ability to spit out answers and make calculations.
Which has a bigger gross domestic product, Spain or Canada? What was New York City’s population in 1900? When did the sun rise in Los Angeles on Nov. 15, 1973? How far is the moon right now? If I eat an apple and an orange, how much protein would I get?
WolframAlpha will tell you — without making you comb through links as a search engine would. It also will graphically illustrate answers when merited. So if you query “GDP Spain Canada” you’d see a chart indicating that Spain’s economy was smaller than Canada’s most of the time since 1970 and recently pulled ahead.
That’s pretty clever.
Yet after testing the service for a few weeks, I think WolframAlpha is unlikely to become a household name — and not just because of the gauze-in-the-mouth logjam of two “f” sounds in the title. While WolframAlpha is brilliant at times and elegant in its display, there aren’t many ways everyday Web users would benefit from using it over other resources.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I’m troubled by the potential for WolframAlpha. I fear the implications of an information butler that is considered so smart and so widely applicable that people turn to it without question, by default, whenever they want to know something.
What’s that, you say? We already have such a service?
Well, for all the fears that Google is making us stupid by making it too easy to look up information, at least Google and its rivals enable the critical thinking that comes from scoping out multiple sources.
Unlike search engines that…