I tried Wolfram Alpha a bit today and played with putting some keyworld like SNP or concepts such as QTL. What I learned is that while some keywords work to give you data others it’s clueless about and didn’t really even bother searching. If I put in a molecule, it’ll give me data about the molecule much as you would expect to find in a properties book. Things like melting point, molecular weight etc. But concepts it’s more touchy. Put in “gravity” and it gives you data and an equation but lacks concept.  While putting “algorithm” it then defines the word and adds etymology ad-nauseum.  So it’s difficult to tell how much of a concept it knows to tell you more about. Its more of a calculator and factoid-spitter than a semantic search.

I would expect that a semantic search would look for “types.” So if perhaps I put in the word “car,” not only would it define it as a “vehicle” but perhaps tell suggest related things “body type, manufacturers, components” so that a researcher could narrow down from the vague to the specific. Instead the options I had were “financial entity, unit, word.” When I clicked on financial entity it gave me a spit out report of Avis Budget Group, the stock status, revenue etc.  (huh?)  Talk about a non-sequitur.

I imagined that a semantic search would behave more like the menu of a wikipedia page. Wikipedia is a great place to start when you don’t know anything about the subject you are trying to explore. It includes both factoid numbers, such as specifications for a certain material, and a list of topics related to that subject. So searching for the “American Independence” will yield not only the date, countries and people involved, but perhaps “list of battles, important declarations” and “documents” etc. And lets say I click on Thomas Jefferson, it would give me how he relates to the “American Independence” since both topics would include a “document” called the “Declaration of Independence.”

My opinion is that currently Wolfram’s Alpha is simply a fancy Mathematica with a dictionary, filled with functions to calculate how many days ago I was born and that my BMI is currently less than optimal. I wouldn’t call this a semantic search just yet and there is still much more to go.

For another point of view read the article below.

Wolfram Alpha: the semantic web search starts to take shape | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Don’t write off Wolfram’s new search engine Alpha just because it can’t do everything at once. It’s going to be a challenger in important places where Google is presently blind

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts