Wolfram Alpha is Not a Search Engine

So today we're going to talk about a subject that I know a lot more about than I normally do on these things. Well from Alpha right, which is not a surge engine, not in the least. No, it is a computational engine, Yes it is, indeed. So um, this was one of those things that's interesting. You know, we always hear about the killer uh apps, or the killer websites, or the killer gadgets that are designed to knock off whatever the most popular version of you know, that thing,

whatever that is. You know, when when a new one comes out, it's the killer version. So like the HTCG one was the iPhone killer, and then the Palm Prex was the iPhone killer. iPhone, by the way, still doing really well. Um, I hadn't. I hadn't heard anything about that. Right. Well, Wolf from Alpha was supposed to be the Google Killer according to some, just like Cool was supposed to be the Google Killer according to something. But the thing is,

that's not what Wolf from Alpha is about. And if you get away from that, if you can clear your mind of the fact that this is uh you know that you put in a query in a little box and you hit a button. As that's the only similarity to the search engine really, I mean, it's it's not designed to pull up links to um two various other sites. Well it does search, it does, but it's searching data. It's not searching. It's not giving you links to other

websites exactly. UM. The reason I the reason I do know more about this than normal is instead of doing an hour or two of research for the podcast, I actually wrote an article on that for the website. UM. And one of the cool things about it is, other than the you know five and thirty three articles that I saw that had Google Killer in it somewhere, UM, I think of it as sort of a difference between uh Wikipedia and Britannica because the because Wikipedia allows you know,

anyone to write or edit an article. H well, you know, in general anyway, and Britannica, at least up until recently, was a closed system. Everything in it was prepared by the people at Britannica exactly. So the difference here is that while Google is allowing you to search the web and anything and everything on the web that it can get its little spiders on anyway, um well from Alpha, all the information provide it on that engine is actually provided by Wolf from Research itself. So it is being

vetted by experts who are putting it together. It's not just not just you know, it's not just looking for the top result and pulling the numbers from whatever that result is and assuming that because of the top result it has to be true. It's actually being looked at by a human being and and uh and validated yep.

And that that's causing a lot of frustration. I wrote a couple of blog posts about it, and I got some comments in which people were saying, you know, I plugged some stuff into to Wolf from Alpha and I I'm just not getting anything useful. Well, the thing is, if you're looking for you know, Britney Spears pictures or the latest flight to Newark or whatever. You're not going to find it. That's not what it's for. Kind of why I'm not using Wolf from Alpha that much because

you know, hit me baby one more time. Please don't tempt me. Um nice, Uh No, it's it's it's there for it's it's more of a research site, right, Um, you know, talking about science or mathematics at least that's what it's being used for now. Even even music. You can find a lot of information on music there, but not you know, popular music. We're talking like music theory. Sure, let's let's talk a little bit about the kind of queries you can put into Wolf from Alpha. That's sort

of clear this up a little bit. So for example, let's say that you are interested in, um, what was the average temperature in a certain city in a certain year. So you could say, all right, well back in what was the average temperature of I don't know, San Diego, California. That might be a piece of data that Wolf from Alpha could actually pull back and give you. Or you could say, give me a range of averages over a range of years, or you could perhaps even compare two

different cities together. Um, that's the kind of data that Wolf from Alpha might be able to pull up that's just one tiny example. Uh. Whereas if you were to search it for Google, you might get a whether website. As a as a recommendation, you might get one that's maybe the San Diego Chamber of Commerce page, maybe an almanac page. Uh. You wouldn't necessarily get the data itself. You would be getting links that could point you to the data. Yeah, you go to Wolf from Alpha if

you're looking for the answer. If you were looking for a page where you might find the answer, you would look at a search engine like Google or Yahoo, Are Asked, or Microsoft, Kumo or whatever it end up being called. Since we're recording this before it actually launched, I had to throw that joke in there anyway. UM so one of my um one of my favorite queries to plug in there, just because they've done a lot of playing

around with it. UM. I plugged in red Panda and Giant Panda, and what Wolf from Alpha will return if you pull plug that in? It actually compares, It builds a table and shows you the differences in this easy so you might see about how tall each of them gets, and about how long each of them gets, and about how heavy they are um and it actually will show you a breakdown of their classification, which is which is

a pretty cool application. Sure, And just for fun, I started throwing in other kinds of animals just to make a really goofy look and graph. So I started throwing in stuff like giant squid and you know, all sorts of things that are way on the other side yet exactly exactly. Um. So if you're if you're into visualization of data, um, this was will really help you with that because you can you can actually get a visual picture of it that will actually put together for you

on the fly, which is very cool. Yeah, And you can even do things like let's say you are considering a new diet and you want to know the nutritional information of various foods. You can even plug that stuff into Wolf Malfa and find out more about it, right, that's true. You can put in something like chocolate and it will instantly bring back some information that. The funny thing is it's going to make an assumption if you say chocolate and plug it in there, and it's going

to say, we're assuming you mean milk chocolate. I'm guessing I haven't actually tried that one, but it will bring you back the average fat um, the calories, and all the other nutritional information about that. Now you say, oh, well I meant actually dark chocolate, you can go in and clarify that search to bring you back more accurate information.

So it actually does. It makes an assumption based on how popular you know it thinks it's going to be, and if it's if you're looking for something more specific, you can make adjustments. Right. And there are some queries that may come back with essentially an error saying that there's no information on that. And in some cases it's really just that the search the search algorithm doesn't recognize the way you've worded your query, and if you reword it,

you might be able to get that information. But in other cases it's just simply a fact that they haven't managed to get a round to entering that data in yet. So um, you know, you can try a few different ways and if nothing's working, that might be a sign that they just that the database doesn't have that info at the moment. Yeah, that's um, that's true. It does require a little bit of uh, I would say practice. You might need to to get used to the syntax.

Um they've actually built in some natural language processing based on what they think you're going to ask it. For example, you know it has a lot in there about mathematics. If you you can actually use some mathematical shorthand to generate a query and will from alpha and it will bring back some results. Now, um, you know, if you said, say a thousand pound feet to newton meters, it may not get that. You might need to say, convert a

thousand pound feet to newt meters and it will go essentially. Oh, now I see what you mean, kay, I can I can convert that for you. Here's what it is one about. If um, let's say that you gave it the dimensions of a building, would it be able to give you the volume? Um? You know what, I'm betting that it probably could have. It's got quite a few algorithms in it.

But that's sort of the idea is that eventually you would get to the point where if you had just an interesting question, thinking like well, this building is so tall and it's so wide and and so deep, I guess you could say how how how much volume is that? And it would be able to calculate it. Uh. I can see this being a big help to people when

they're doing their math homework. Yeah. Actually, uh, it might be a little too much in some regards, UM, because you can plug in, um, say a calculus problem into Wolf from Alpha, and it will give you a result. And it also has a little link off to the side that says show steps, and it will break it down into each individual step that you need to go through in the process of this complicated problem, and you

know how you get the result. Now, theoretically you could go in and copy this all down, UM, but if you do that and cheat on your homework, you're not actually learning anything and you're going to fail a testing class. Although I think that would have been very handy back when I took Calculus, because um, I had I had difficulties grasping certain concepts, and if I had had this to show me each step, perhaps I would have been

able to follow the logic of each step a little better. UM. It felt to me back when I was taking Calculus, and granted this was as many moons ago, but when I when I was taking it, it just felt like there was no rhyme or reason to the rules that I was applying, and so perhaps using something like this would have kind of made me understand and therefore do

better on a test than I would have before. Now, granted, that's only if I were actually using it to see how how it got from one step to the next, as opposed to just copying it down so that I could do my homework and record time and I can go play Halo for another hour or so. Well, you know, if you actually learned, earned what you were supposed to be learning, and could actually go ahead and play Halo,

then you'd be killing two birds with ones. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Um. I don't wish to cast expersions upon my calculus teacher either, but I don't think she listens, so it's all right. I had similar problems grasping calculus, and um I probably also would have welcomed the additional you know, taking you step by step through it, because she really lost patience

with me. Now, the cool thing about Wolf from Alpha is that's really going to make research a lot easier for for certain, um certain applications, and I'm looking forward to using it more in the future when the database is a bit more robust, because there are certain things that you know, facts and figures that I would love to have access to and I can't always be certain

that I have the latest information. Sometimes I find information that's a year or two old, and I don't really want to depend on that because it could have changed dramatically. For example, just throwing a random thing out there, and I'm not saying that Wolf from alf actually has this. In fact, I know for I know that my query didn't work most recently. But let's say I wanted to

find out how many users MySpace has. UM. That would be a useful thing, you know, just or being able to compare various social networking sites across uh an array of different criteria. It would be great to be able to do that and just take a quick look and say, oh, look at this. It's kind of surprising that such and such social networking site has gained a lot of ground

over the big names over the last twelve months. UM. So I can see this being a very useful tool for me in the future and for lots of other people as well. Students, scholars, you know, more, other journalists, and just if you just have one of those things where you know, you just need to know the answer to something like what's the population of Detroit compared to the way it was ten years ago. I mean, that's kind of it's kind of cool to be able to

get all that at your fingertips instantly. Yep. And it it does calculate a lot of that stuff UM on the fly, things like UM currency conversions. You can find out what temperature it is at any place in the world. You know. It actually gets information from local weather stations. UM. So you can look up, say Detroit, and find out what temperature it is. You can find out when the sun's gonna set. UH. You'll even you can even find out when the next lunar eclipse is going to be UM.

And it tells you that in real time. You can get stock quotes just by by putting that in. UH. If you know stock symbol or a company name, it will give you company information. If you put any date in, it will give you anything significant about that date, including any holidays that follow on that date, uh, any historical events that happened on that date. UM. So you can put your birth date in and it will tell you

what day of the week it was. I'll tell you what the what what, what phase the moon was in on that day. UM. It's kind of an interesting thing that you can and you can even see like how how far into the year that date was, how far into the month that date was, in case you weren't able to work it out yourself. But uh, it's you know, right, I guess like, oh gosh, you're right June twenty six,

that is twenty six days into June. Um, no, no, it's but it's really a neat, neat tool that you can you know, it's one of those things where you plug any date and so of course everyone just immediately because puts their birthday in to see what happened. By the way, nothing significant other than my birth happened on my birthday, according to Wolf from Alpha. Well you know we had to reserve it, right, just thank you. I

would hate to be overshadowed by something so um. Yeah, actually this uh, this was all sort of sprung on us, which is very very surprising considering all the hype for all the other tech things that go on, you know, the lot of stuff we talk about too. Um but it actually sort of goes back to a March fifth, nine posts by Stephen Wolfram in the Wolf from blog. And uh, you know he said Wolf from Alpha is cuming and narrowly, you know, we might not be so interested.

But you know, Stephen Wolfram is a former child prodigy. He actually got his doctorate and when he was twenty years old from cal Tech, which means no one from M. I. T. Will be using Wolf from Alpha um it now. He he wrote his first scientific paper at fifteen and got his PhD in theoretical physics when he was twenty UM and then Wolf from Research, which is the company that

actually you know, he started and produces. Wolf from Alpha created a piece of software that I'm sure many of you have heard of, but like me, sort of only vaguely are aware of, called Mathematica UM, which basically crunches numbers in serious, serious ways. It's not the kind of thing that you would buy for fun. It's, you know, three piece of software for the home version. I can't even imagine what the business version costs UM. But that's

actually what Wolf from Alpha is based on. It uses the computational algorithms and mathematics to bring down, you know, the data that you're looking for and crunch it together to make results page. It has a lot to do with the the way it looks too, because um um mathematic it helps you visualize mathematical information. So, UM, you know this, this works a lot different from the Google

algorithms that Google uses to search the web. Right. Google algorithms are more about finding the links that most people are linking to, really and judging that as a a symbol of quality. So if a lot of people are linking to a particular page, that page and Google's eyes, is more important than other pages that contain the same keywords and therefore goes higher up on the list. Um. That's a very that's a huge oversimplification of the Google algorithm because there's a lot more to it than that.

But that's the basic idea. Uh. But yeah, like we said, since the Wolf from Alpha is not a search engine, it doesn't really apply and it's not the kind of place that you will find advertising yet. Um, Google has um pulled down one billion dollars in revenue, that is advertising revenue. UM. As of right now, Wolf from Alpha does not have any advertising on it, although there is some code UM that's commented out apparently that has room

for possible advertising. UM. So there that may be a clue as to what they're going to do with it eventually once it gets up and running and more robust. UM. You want to have some technical stuff about Wolf hit me because it's Wow, you're just so generous with the offers to hit you today. Yeah, well, I'm I'm feeling like a target anyway, so just go for it. UM. Wolf from Alpha runs on a system uses the world sixty six fastest supercomputer, a system of custom Dell hardware

UM built by our systems UM. It's called are Small UM and it it can do thirty nine point six trillion mathematical operations per second. It's got a four thousand, six hundred eight processor corps UM with five seventy six squad core harpertown Zon machines. It's got sixty five thousand, five thirty six gigabytes of memory, which is just slightly faster than my laptop computer at my desk here how stuff works dot com they actually have five co location facilities,

so it's technically two supercomputers. And uh, you know that's that's a whole lot of processing power. But they're probably gonna need it if they're going to keep adding information to this uh to this computational um. Yes, computational engines. I mean, uh, well, and and before we before we go too far, I also wanted to mention that, um, the builders, the developers of Wolf from Alpha have a

sense of humor. Ah, yes, so you mean not. You can't just plug in a mathematical con version or you know, some kind of um musical note series and find out the distances between the notes. Can do that, but you

can do more than that. There are there are certain easter eggs that are in Wolf from Alpha, and some of them have been publicized, and I'm sure there are many others that we haven't even thought of yet that someone's eventually gonna uncover When they just say, I'm going to be a smart ale, I can put this in and then they're cann't find out there's actually an answer. For example, you can open up Wolf from the Alpha and type in why did the chicken cross the road?

The answer you will get is to get to the other side. So it's not that it doesn't tell you that there's no answer. It gives you the answer to the joke. And it's of course, just like everything else in Wolf from Alpha. It's just presented there in black and white, you know, matter of fact. So that kind of makes it even more funny to me, because there's no indication that this is a joke, but there are a lot of others that you can put in as well. Yep, I know that in one preview blog I read when

I was trying to collect information from my article. Um, you know, they're all kinds of well this is really cool or I don't know if it'll be able to knock off Google random comments like that. But somebody said, I want I want to know what the air speed is of an unladen swallow, and if it can tell me that, I'm quitting Google forever and paraphrasing this. As it turns out, you can plug that question and get an answer. Yes, the answer. The answer is not do

you mean an African or a European swallow? It's more complicated than that, but it is in fact a reference to the fantastic film Money, Python and the Holy Grail. And it does make an assumption. It says, assuming you mean right, exactly which is right? And then there's um, there are other ones as well. I'm sure. Well, like I said, we'll find more. Um, we'll see what exactly what is what is the answer to life, the universe

and everything? Forty two? So they obviously some Douglas Adams fans over in the Wolf from ALFA team as well. So yeah, I mean it's it's great to know that not only are are there these dedicated people trying to put in this this very important information that will soon be at our disposal at a moment's notice, they are also putting in goofy answers for those of us who

are complete and utter dorks. Well, there are a lot of people who, uh, who are taking shots at at Wolf from Alpha because it isn't Google and also because it doesn't have every answer to every problem ever invented. Um, it's gonna take them a while. They're about two fifty people working on the project right now, and you know, there's a lot of info out there. They have to break things down into little snippets. Um. Apparently there are more than ten trillion pieces of tagged information in the

system already. Yeah, and when you're actually going in and making sure that the answers are correct before you put them in, that that's sort of time and labor intensive. So um, you know, I think we're gonna need to be somewhat patient. But it's I think it's a really cool, uh really cool and very useful tool. And you're not the only one. There are companies like Google that also think it's a very cool and very useful tool and are incorporating bits of the functionality of Wolf from Alpha

into their own coding. Yeah. I actually, uh, I had heard that Stephen Wolf froman Seragey Brin actually talked before the release, and you know, he seemed very impressed. Mr Brenn seemed very impressed with what And for a while Google has been doing some similar things to this. For instance, if you put in a city name, it might actually, you know, at the top tell you what the temperature and other little bits of data are about that city before you go and click on a link, but not

to the extent that Wolf from Alpha does. But it was clear that Google was already interested in this kind of thing from the get go, and you could also do things like you know, conversions and stuff um through Google as well, UM to some extent. And I think that we're going to see a lot more search engines try and incorporate this sort of approach and presented in such a way where it doesn't dwarf out the search results, but it's sort of in addition to them, so sometimes

you just need the answer. Yeah, and uh, yeah, sometimes you don't want to click on three or four links trying to get to that one piece of information that you want. That's true, That's true. That's the way I feel about it. Anywhere pretty much everybody, I think, I mean, there are may be a few people who kind of enjoy the whole discovery route where you find something that you weren't expecting, But if you really need that one piece of information, you pretty much put blinders up and

you just scan for that info anyway. So yeah, I think there's room in uh, in the average person's toolbox or something like that. So, um, you know, good luck to the Wolf from Gang and hopefully they'll they'll find a place in everyone's heart, certainly hope. So I mean it definitely helps uh everyone, really, I mean, it just it just adds more options whenever you have to get that a So good luck guys. Now, did you have anything else to add for Wolf from Alpha? No? No,

that's that's it for right now. I guess that just leaves listener made all right, then, all right here we go. My name's Josh, and I was listening to your podcast and found these three mistakes that on their video game related Number one in your Emulation or Virtual Machine podcast, you referred to the old games on the we shop channel as we wear we wear is games. I guess we were our games made especially for the wee example

World of Goo or Tetris Party. I believe that you meant virtual console titles, which are games for older systems, and yeah, that's kind of what we were talking about. Were the old games on the Nintendo. But number two in the same podcast, you said that those games were emulated, which is not true either. The games have been reformatted in a way that the we can read them, sometimes with added features such as Pokemon Snap, which lets you save pictures to the Wei message board. I heard the

Nintendo wouldn't let developers just emulate the games. Also true, it's reformatted as opposed to emulate it. If you're emulating a game, then you're trying to recreate the uh the way that the original hardware, right, the environment that the original hardware and software had in order to play the game, whereas this was reformatting so they would work with different hardware.

Number three. In another podcast one after the April Fools podcast, someone told you that you forgot the legend of Zelda movie trailer joke by YouTube. YouTube did not in fact make that joke. I g n S video team made the video, and that's why it was so believable. Someone on YouTube copied the video, so that was an our mistake. That was a listener mistake. That makes me feel better. Yeah, just so two out of three were ours and the other one with someone else's. Um. Actually, I knew that

YouTube hattent made that video as well. I knew that it had been posted to YouTube, but yeah, because that was a listener mail, I had not actually looked up the original creators, though I had seen it the video in question at at some point. So thank you very much, Josh greatly appreciate it. If any of you want to write to us, you can text stuff at how stuff works dot com and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics.

Is it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you