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August 24, 2009
Wolfram|Alpha Hard at Work Three Months After Launch
It's been three months since Wolfram|Alpha launched as a search engine for structured data. But they haven't just sat back and hoped WA took off. No, they've been hard at work attempting to improve upon their search offering.
Most of the work has centered around two things:
- Things that searchers want that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't know yet
- Questions that Wolfram|Alpha doesn't understand (aka linguistics)
While this presents challenges, founder Stephen Wolfram sees the glass as half full.
"The good news is that there's been very little that's come through that wasn't already somewhere on our to-do lists. They're long lists. But we can now be confident that they're good lists," Wolfram wrote on the official WA blog.
And they're already checking things off those lists. They're understanding the linquistics problem better and have reduced the "fall-through rate" of misunderstood queries by 10%.
Here's what else the WA team has been up to - all of this since launch:
- Codebase has grown by a staggering 52%--adding well over 2 million lines of Mathematica code.
- Classified 54,233 of feedbacks as bugs or suggestions. Of these, 31,006 are now in the implementation queue, consolidated to about 5800 to-do items.
- 3,907 people who have submitted bugs have been told they've been fixed.
- To-do list has grown from 250 per week to 600 per week.
What do you think of Wolfram|Alpha's progress? Let us know by leaving a comment.
Posted by Nathania Johnson on August 24, 2009 1:13 AM
Comments
I keep hearing little snippets about these guys coming up to take over the world (of search). Do you think they will or have what it takes?
Prepaid Legal Services August 24, 2009 9:19 PM
Jonathan,
I don't think that Wolfram|Alpha even wants to take over search as a whole. I think their main goal is search of structured data combined with computation. But I don't think their goal is to index all of the web's pages and ranking them.
If they do that well, and all indications are that they're doing it better than anyone, I foresee a bunch of partnerships with search engines and applications that integrate WA search into their own.
Nathania Johnson August 24, 2009 11:30 PM
You have while to go. Many people don't understand what you are about. I certainly DO NOT think that you are a conventional "SEARCH ENGINE".
Your business model (how you intend to make money is not clear to me). Years ago the first stock that I bought was in Google and it made and is still making a fair amount of money for me. Is there a Wolfram Alpha stock yet and what is its name.
By the way I am a mathematician (foundations of math) and did graduate work at University of California, Berkley.
David Kaplan August 25, 2009 1:04 PM
