WolframAlpha - no Google killer

There's been a bit of buzz about WolframAlpha lately, but I checked it out and moved on.  Will it have a bearing on e-business.  Probably not.  Here's why ...

To ramp up the old hype machine, WolframAlpha by Wolfram Research bills itself as the computational knowledge engine.  Its supposed to have the answer to all your questions.

Well being a Douglas Adams fan, the concept reminded me of the supercomputer Deep Thought the first thing I tried is "Life, The Universe and Everything" and got a bit of an unexpected chuckle that it returned the answer "42".

But after poking around for a few minutes, I couldn't really find much to separate it from whats been tried before with other search engines.  It reminds me of what "Ask Jeeves" tried to do way back in 1996.  It also follows the same formula of Google and Wikipedia which have now spread to so many different facets of knowledge.  Google does do the sorts of things that WolframAlpha does (such as calculations, currency conversion etc), but the new search engine incorporates a Web 2.0 AJAX style interface which just presents a little slicker.

Sure, the concept is simple, but the execution needs to be right.  About 9/10 of the questions I put to WolframAlpha frustratingly returned absolutely nothing.

So, I quickly moved on.

But while I'd expect the concept will be refined, I don't expect it to challenge Google in the forseeable future.  The main reason is that for Google to do the same would really take very little effort at all.  And there is so much more to Google in terms of online marketing for business that businesses now depend upon and WolframAlpha, like Wikipedia, doesn't seem to have in its business plans.

I couldn't see myself using it on a day to day basis and once you've gotten used to finding information the Google or Wikipedia way, you can do it just as quickly and efficiently anyway.

There are so many brief fascinations on the Internet that come and go, I feel that this may be one of them and it certainly isn't a catch name.

But I'm happy to be proven wrong and interested to hear other people's experiences of WolframAlpha.