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 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.

-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

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.

-mw