A Wolfram Alpha killer already?

Things move fast in the Internet world! Only a week or so back we were being told about WolframAlpha, a tool that could apparently topple Google. It turns out that it’s a completely different type of search that is in a completely different arena to Google so it’s no threat.

But then Google say “Oh, we’ve got one of those! You want one of those? Yeah, we’ve got one of those.” and gives us ‘Google Squared’.

Blimey, what’s going on?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that we don’t want to find web pages anymore, we’re just after information and stuff that’s useful in pub quizzes. Certainly Wolfram Alpha think that and now Google do with their new tool that sounds like it does what Wolfram does.

Except it doesn’t. Isn’t it confusing?

Google squared apparently gives us answers to our question, however it’s not really that simple. Instead of just asking a question, it gives you the ability to create ’squares’ of knowledge. You start with a keyword and then add columns to the search to request more data.

For example, if I wanted to know the population of England, I type ‘England’ into a column and it goes and gets some data. I then create a column heading called ‘population’ and it goes and gets it. It’s pretty neat, but it’s doing the opposite to Wolfram.

With Wolfram, I just type in ‘what’s the population of England’ and it tells me, this video shows how it works:

Wolfram V Google

Wolfram is the easiest by far, it just gives you what you want, however Google’s is more of a research tool that may be far better for the geeks amongst us.

But remember, Google won over everyone when it made search easier, that’s what wolfram has done with research, can Google win just because it’s Google?