Posted on July 31st, 2009Launched in March, 2009, Wolfram Alpha is a new answer engine designed to provide results on factual queries. While this is certainly a unique and innovative concept, many are unsure of whether to call it a search engine or if it serves as worthy competition to the big three. More importantly, businesses are wondering if they need to restructure their optimization efforts around Wolfram Alpha or continue to focus on the major search engines.
What Exactly is Wolfram Alpha?
Wolfram Alpha is described as a computational knowledge engine, one that aims to deliver expert knowledge and capabilities to the greatest range of internet users. It is said to benefit all professions and education levels, generating powerful results and presenting them with the utmost clarity. Because the results are not necessarily based on web pages and encyclopedic information like other search engines, it is widely assumed that Wolfram utilizes a combination of both to compute answers.
Wolfram Alpha is certainly advanced and could prove to be a vital internet tool in the future. The big question is: what affect will it have on e-commerce? We believe the current answer is a resounding NONE for the following three reasons:
1.) Doesn’t Appeal to Shoppers – One disadvantage of Wolfram Alpha is that it doesn’t offer results commonly sought after by online shoppers. Although this isn’t the primary goal of the engine, it fails to deliver results on even the simplest terms. This alone makes it a big turn off to consumers looking to buy items or average users simply looking for basic information.
2.) Insufficient Results - Wolfram Alpha is supposedly a data-driven answer engine that gives detailed, scientific answers to technical questions. However, if you enter certain terms, Wolfram is likely to get many of them wrong and return results for entirely different words. From an efficiency aspect, it is clear to see that Wolfram Alpha still has a long way to go in being a specialist at servicing technical queries.
3.) Can’t Comprehend E-commerce – Perhaps the biggest reason Wolfram Alpha isn’t suited for the online business world is that even after a few months, the engine still has no idea what the term “e-commerce” means. In fact, when typing the term into the search box, the results come back as “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”. You can try to get cute with the other common term “ecommerce”, but the finished product doesn’t get any better. The engine assumes that the term relates to the financial industry and provides results on a company by the name of Commerce Bancshares. Whether Wolfram Alpha was designed with online shop owners in mind or not, tendencies such as this leads you to wonder if anyone can get much use out of this tool.
Conclusion
It is pretty easy to poke fun at Wolfram Alpha engine and its deficiencies. However, you should keep in mind that the engine is in its beginning stages and like most web-based platforms, improvements are sure to come. One day, Wolfram could be a powerful tool but as of now, it is simply irrelevant for most users. You probably want all the visibility possible but optimizing your site for this engine would be a total waste at this time.