Wolfram Alpha

I was reading some news on BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and came across Stephen Wolfram's "Computational Knowledge engine". The title of the news reads as "Web tool 'as important as Google'" and I kept reading to see what is it all about. The free engine - Wolfram Alpha aims to answer question from a natural language directly rather than provide web pages like Google.com. His plan is to launch this knowledge engine by May (2009(?)). Wolfram states "Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.


Stephen Wolfram is a British physicist, mathematician and businessman famed for his work in complexity theory, and com. View and Read his Blog Here

Is Wolfram Alpha groundbreaking? Well, there is another guy called Dr Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He created a question answering system called Start - I went to the website and typed "What is your name" Start answered " My name is START; it stands for SynTactic Analysis using Reversible Transformations. Source: START KB" Did you know about this question answering engine? if not - same with me. Anyways, Wolfram "disappointed" Dr. Katz on dismissing of English syntax as "fluff". Dr. Katz then states

"...suppose someone asks ''When did Barack Obama visit Nicolas Sarkozy?" Here, understanding the sentence structure is important if you want to be able to distinguish cases where it was Barack Obama who visited Nicolas from cases where it was Nicolas Sarkozy who visited Barack Obama,"
"I believe he is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organises concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing."

Finally, I would say that the media is comparing Wolfram Alpha with Google ... I ask what the media is trying to convey about this web tool? And What do you think about this engine? Keep in mind that Wolfram Alpha aims to answer natural language questions rather than provide a lot of web pages --- :-)

So what do you think?