Wolfram Alpha is a new project by Steven Wolfram, british mathematician, physician and creator of Mathematica - technical computing application. This week Wolfram annouced that his company is going to launch new search engine on May. it is going to be named Wolfram Alpha. Known as innovative and good in writing computing algorhytms Wolfram may creata something really big. From what we could have read in the media buzz on Wolfram Alpha is going to be combination of semantic search engine with question gathering one.

The main innovation is fact that WA is going to generate answers in real time, without gathering them previously. It is something tottaly opposite to what we could have seen , for example, in Ask.com. Answers are “computed” from unstructurized data processed by engine’s algorhytms and than answers are generated. These algorhytms are said to be based on natural language, which is fully understood by the engine. Answers are going to be given in plain language and contain extract from indexed data.

Interesting thing is that index for this search engine is not like traditional one - created by some crawlers from data of web-origin and stats. Some parts of WA’s index are large databeses from various fields, huge amounts of information about physical world is gathered in them - WA is going to offer more formal sort of knowledge than for example Google, that bases on different types of media information, which often is informal.

Right now the project is in private beta phase.  You can ask for invitation or subscribe for newsletter.

Questions we can aks at this moment are concerned on the nature of the results given by WA, under some assumptions this project might look like step back. Is it going to be improved Wikipedia, with formal and credible knowledge? What about network business model - if users are not going to be contributors at the same time, would they like to use it, if the knowledge is not going to be democratized?

-mw

Aardvark is a search engine founded by ex-Googlers, that uses social network power. It is not based on information created by users and than indexed. It is distributing the query among your afiliates and their afiliates, who find themselves good at different fields - if you’re lucky you might get the answer. Idea is not stupid, or rather decent. User can ’search’ by using IM, e-mail, SMS or Twitter.

To increase probability of being answered you should take care and gather as much friends in the service as possible, which is a little bit hard especially at the begging after releasing public beta version. But there is an option to grab the contact list from Facebook connect.

After typing in the query the algorhytm searches for person that is most probable to have knowledge about what user is aksing. Than user just have to wait for the answer. Basis for poining on specific user as the one who has appropriate knowledge is the fact that he introduced himself as having knowledge on particular field, coming from specific region or interested in something user asked about.

It looks like this sort of human powered search is one with completely new approach. It is interesting how many degrees of affiliation can be potentially used. However it can be a great source of help and really practicl information in some cases. Except for that Aardvark looks like it is going to be not only the source of information but also sort of place to make friends and have fun.

-mw

At the end of this week Microsoft will start internal tests of its new search engine, that will replace Live Search. In the long run Microsft is going to resign from Live Search brand completetly and create new engine and new brand at the same time.

The news was published by Barney Pell, one of Microcorp evangelists and formerly one of the authors of Powerset search engine. The rumour was buzzed at Twitter and than Microsoft confirmed that they work on creating new engine, although no ballpark date was given.

Microsoft bought domain kumo.com and redirects its internatl traffic to it. Kumo is a Japan word meaning “cloud” or “spider”, could it be that data gathered in web clouds also is going to indexed?

-mw

Faroo is an initiative geared towards merging p2p mechanism and search engine’s nature. By downloading Faroo, user becomes the part of decentralized network of crawlers that create contribute to creating index. With one difference - only visited pages are indexed. It is nothing like searching for UFO screen saver, sharing computer resources. In fact it is a user who is the crawler - visited pages are added to index, so index is a result of browsing history of all Faroo users, not like in traditional search engines, where crawler “goes” from one server to another.

Faroo contains also some interesting mechanism except of offering becoming part of search engine - PageRank mechanism is also built with completely new approach. It does not look like traditional page rank mechanism, in Faroo it is not page owner, who decides about the position in the ranking, by linking pages togather. Faroo offers user-oriented technology - user’s behaviour is being tracked while browsing specific page and it is automatically counted in the ranking. It sounds a little bit enigmous, I imagine that final contribution to Page Rank is a net force of lenght of the stay, number of clicks and the nature of clicks (ads or content), maybe also adding to favourites.

Faroo is an interesting initiative, it is even more curious how it will be developed. At least I am going to stay tuned at their blog.

-mw

Have you ever had this problem that while searching you did not reach satisfying results and you did not know what other words you could use to get more precise results? It  is quite often problem I guess. One of the possible solutions is using different kinds of vocabularies, like synonyms. However there are some tools that you can use with pleasure to inspire yourself while working on specific query.

First one is Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus, created in cooperation with EU. It is a multilingual tool (english, german, duth, italian, spanish and french, although english version is most developed) that enables user to see the hierarchy of words related to searched term. User gets map of related words, brenches, synonyms, definitions and subcategories. It was developed as a language learning tool - that is why except for map of words user gets also a lot of grammatical information, but thanks to its innovativeness and usability of knowledge user can expand his or her knowledge about query that is currently conducted. There is just one drawback of Visual Thesaurus - it is a paid service, without paying user can go only with few queries.

Second tool is a Visuword application, developed by Princeton students and researchers. Main idea is simmilar, but… Visuwords presents the map of associations with complete information on the matter of various associations - by arrows in different colours user can lear if the result means for example: word A “is a member of” word B, A “causes” B etc. In visuwords results are also presented in form of thinkmap, after putting cursor on specific node of net of words user get additional information on this word.

Such tools are useful on stage of planning the query before you really start searching. It helps to organize knowledge for analyzing the data you have already gathered, get fresh ideas by expanding the view on particular topic - there can always exist some aspects you did not take into account.

-mw