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?

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At Gord Hotchkiss’ site we can find interesting interview with dr Teena Moody from UCLA’s Semel Institute, who conducted survey on how human’s brain work during searching the web. The research is based on the method name as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Main goal of this research was to find out on the scale of differences between human’s brain work during reading and searching the web. Another dimension of the research was to check if there are any differences between different grops of people - heavy users and novices.

Magnetic resonance revealed that brains of novices, named by dr Moody Internet-naive persons, during searching the web behave at the same way as they were reading, on the other hand heavy users’ brains work more activelly, more brain centers are active. Especially front and limbic lobes are being used by heavy-searchers. These two lobes are responsible for making decisions and conflict settlement.

Brain centres active during searching the web for heavy-users and novices:

Explanation for that fact is quite simple, using the Internet changes our brain work procedures, people who do not use Internet everyday behave like children in the mist - they just fell lost in new enviroment and act like they were reading it, gathering the information to get the full scope of view. However heavy-users make decisions basing on the information the just have found in perfectly known enviroment.

This partly supports thesis that using Internet changes our brains.

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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?

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Junoba is a head’n’shoulders of search engines - it is a 2 in 1 application. One of its functions is aggregation of social bookmarking services topics and the other one is ability to search through these services. Among them user can find Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Reddit, Propeller and Mixx. It does not work on any new algorhtym, but it uses Google Custom Search technology. It is another decent initiative that uses GCS tools - recently I wrote about KidRex that is also based on Google Custom Search.

Idea of searching through web 2.0 services is not new, I bet that everybody interested in SE business can name at least few engines that search through social web services. However searching through bookmarking services is fresh idea. It is a great tool to get information a little bit different to mainstream media news. Junoba can help in reducing the meaning of agenda setting effect - users can learn which opinions are really popular on specific fields.

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Swagbucks is a search engine that offers its users a sort of a game. By searching you can win prizes. All you have to do is to register - to enable Swagbucks’ administrator localize you and send you prizes. It works very simply - the more you search, the more valuable prizes you get. This service is also connected with e-shopping - when you shop you earn some points that you can later change on prizes from offer.

Swagbucks is also kind of Argentinian piramid loyalty programme. You can invite you friends and when they are getting points you get part of it. These who register as really first ones will get more of goods. So hurry up if you want to get a piece of pie.

Service as entity looks like someone connected few different marketing tools to camouflage e-store as search engine. If this will work and gather nice community around it might bring a proper income.

-mw