This month, a new Internet search engine called WolframAlpha will be launched that answers users' questions directly using an algorithm and other computational functions that were developed by scientist Stephen Wolfram, who had already dabbled in computer solutions to algebra problems in a program called Mathematica .
"While it's tempting to think of Wolfram|Alpha as a place to look things up, that's only part of the story. What really puts Wolfram|Alpha on another level is that it performs sophisticated actions for you, both with numbers and formulas and by gathering data from all over the Internet," the new system's blog post says in its mission statement.
Its creator claims that these computer databases can transform generic information into specific responses, that is, they provide relevant data, which would speed up the breakthrough towards Web 3.0 , the semantic Internet where meaning matters.
"As if we were interacting with an expert, the architect data search engine can understand what we are looking for, perform the calculation and give the precise answer," says the company's website.
Wolfram illustrates his progress by explaining that if we search the Internet for the answer to the question "What is the distance between the Earth and the Moon?", we would find one piece of data, while the true answer is that the separation is not constant, something that this system takes into account to provide a dynamic solution.
In this sense, many argue that this search engine is getting closer to the long-awaited Holy Grail of the Internet, but just as in the search for the Ark of the Covenant, what matters more is the existence of the concept than the thing itself, so the importance of this solution is not its current contributions but its dynamic profile that brings us closer to what we are looking for.
This chimera is what will shake the foundations of Google, since the search engine that had consolidated itself in a dominant position could have an avid competitor, especially in the segment of new copy-paste students, but many consider that Wolfram is more of a symbiotic strainer than a competitor, which needs the Mountain View giant to function.