A new alternative to Wikipedia?

My first blog posting on the klickdigital blog and I thought I would blog about a new competitor to Wikipedia - Wolframalpha. Some recent press reports are citing it as a Google beater but it is not a search engine - it delivers answers to your questions based on its database of knowledge. The way it does this is through a 'computational knowledge engine'.

You ask it a question and the computational knowledge engine actually understands your question and computes the answer for you. It doesn't simply search questions and answers / documents for matching text, it really does try to understand the question and build an answer from its knowledge database.

Wolframalpha is launching this weekend and is still building its database of knowledge but for an early release I am impressed and I think it has a big role to play as it starts to become established.

What I really like about it is the way it presents the answer/information - the answers are presented in an easy to read format and it only deals with facts, not opinion. The links in the sidebars to relevant Wikipedia entries and web links give the user important supporting information from other leading sources. These supporting information reference points are powerful tools and I think it makes sense to move these up to the top of the right hand side of the screen - instead of having to scroll down the page to see them at the bottom right - and move the 'New to Wolframalpha' section to the left hand side of the page.

It is going to be a great source for students - from solving equations to pulling key facts together and might soon become a key business tool - especially if they integrate Google and Wikipedia.

Overall I like it and will certainly be watching how it develops over the next 3 months