Over the past few months since Wolfram was announced on Techcrunch, the company that wishes to answer user’s semantic questions has decided to keep themselves as closed as possible, until the past week. Until the release of Google’s Public Data Charts, Wolfram kept pretty quiet. On April 28th, Stephen Wolfram presented Wolfram|Alpha to Harvard Law Schools and broadcasted it online. Conviently, Google released its new addition to search by allowing you to see publicly accessible data inside searches, and then compare that data with other sets of data on a graph.
Before the presentation, Wolfram has kept a mailing list, as is common for most pre-release applications, and didn’t send out almost any email through it. The minute they launched however, this changed. In the past week, I’ve received several emails from Wolfram promoting its launch and the presentation at Harvard. But there is a problem:
I still can’t use it.
Even after presenting it to Harvard, and making quite a bit of fuss in the news, still no one can actually use the applications. So why did Wolfram become so active in the mailing list suddenly? Its simple, Google started competing with them.
Since Google has launched it Public Data application, along with various other applications integrating into Google search, Google is actually competing with Wolfram head on. Google is making it easier to get different types of data in the most commonly used search engine on the Internet, and with the addition of public data, it is simple to Google the unemployment rates of any state, and compare it with any other site.
If Google expands this to encompass more public data, it could significantly cut down the significance of using Wolfram. Yes, you would be able to ask it direct questions, but if any of those answers can be found on Google, you might prefer to access it on a website that lets you compare it to other regions and other statistics as well.
Do you think Google adding things like public data will compete with Wolframs semantic search results?
