And another thing

Rory Cellan-Jones has a superb blog covering some of his work as the BBC’s technology correspondent.

In this recent piece which aired on BBC World he looks at the nascent battle between the newly launched Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge engine” and the internet search engine giant Google.

If this is a genuine competition then we might be on the threshold of a contestable market! Google accounts for over sixty per cent of internet searches and it has found a business model that successfully monetises the search engine technology (my own small business makes extensive use of Google analytics and online advertising and I can confirm how effective it is.)

“Wolfram Alpha is designed to answer complex search queries by returning a single result. Unlike Google, which searches the entire web for the keywords contained within a search query and then returns thousands of relevant web pages, Wolfram Alpha aims to understand the question and return the correct answer by mining its vast database of information and statistics.”

Inspired and designed by an old Etonian .... does this have legs? Does this take us closer to a symantic web? Keep in mind that it is in the very early stages of development and that the project will benefit from collaborative work from thousands of people around the world.

Have a look at Wolfram Alpha and test it with some economics and business inquiries!