Wolfram Alpha: taking the first steps to an invaluable future

Wolfram Alpha is the first small step on the way to having a system that answers questions. It doesn't have anything like enough data to be useful at the moment, but it could become invaluable in the future
Gobi desert
A road in the Gobi desert. But how many are there to walk down? Photograph: Adrian Bradshaw/EPA

Wolfram Alpha is no ordinary search engine, but occupies a space somewhere between Google and Wikipedia. Whether it will ever be as successful is open to doubt. However, if you need exactly the sort of answer that Wolfram Alpha is designed to provide, it's already a terrific resource.

The site's slogan says it's a "computational knowledge engine" and the search box has an equals sign at the end. It's probably most useful as a "homework engine" - though one that is focused on science, engineering and maths, rather than the arts and humanities.

Wolfram Alpha's heritage comes from Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica software, which has been around for more than 20 years. It's a computational tool that enables you to manipulate, analyse and visualise data: its capabilities range from solving equations to creating real-time 3D graphics.

At its simplest, Wolfram Alpha is a calculator, but one that understands things like quantum mechanics. To that, Wolfram Research has added data from fields such as geography, medicine, sociology, finance, education, music and sport.

For example, do you want to know what size shoe to buy in Japan, to match your British size 11s? Google will find you conversion tables but Wolfram Alpha will do the job. Using the convention that anything inside the square brackets goes in the search box, enter [U.K. men's size 11 shoe in Japanese size].

The shoe size conversion is one of the dozens of example queries that Wolfram Alpha provides. Studying the examples will save you a lot of time in the long run, because the more precise your question, the more likely you are to get a useful answer. Wolfram Alpha doesn't do sloppy.

It's also excellent at comparing stock prices and it can convert some currencies. Give it questions like that and you also get tons of background info and graphs.

Wolfram Alpha can answer more general queries, such as Who wrote Stairway to Heaven?, How big is the Gobi desert?, and even How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?, but it's extremely short of material in many areas. This is because it doesn't search the web. It only uses data that has been tested and uploaded by its own engineers.

Wolfram says that when computing started, 50 years ago, people thought they "would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. But it didn't work out that way."

It's becoming possible now, he says, thanks to the vast amount of data available on the web, and Wolfram Research's Mathematica and NKS (A New Kind of Science).

Wolfram Alpha shows that it's now possible to answer some questions, just not enough of them to be useful. But this is only the beginning. It will get better as the platform is developed and more data sets are added.

Google has come a long way in the past decade. It will be interesting to see where Wolfram Alpha is in 2020.