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

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

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

Baidu - leading Chinese Search Engine was sued by medical B2B service Qmyy for blocking their site in Baidu search results. Qmyy demands 1.106 million yuan ($161,460) for the loses caused by their absence in search results. According to ChinaDaily the lawsuit was filed after failure in attempts to get out-of-court agreement. Baidu explains that Qmyy’s site was blocked because it contains ‘junk information’.

Baidu has 65% share in search market in China, it has great potential in perspective of growth of number of Internet users in PRC, at the moment it is about 250 million people (about 1/6 of whole population).

-mw

Hitwise published the results for US search market. According to them Google reached 71,70% and at the same time gained 7,21% of whole market comparing October 2008 to the previous year, the same month. Google’s growth is common loss of Yahoo, MSN and Ask, which lost as follows: -3,91%, -2,02%, -1,23%.

That only confirms that Google’s growth is very dynamic and at the moment outclasses other search engines. There are speculations that if Google continue to grow in that pace it can soon reach 100%.

I think it is not possible for two reasons, even if shown as percentage. Firstly, Google’s algorhytm is not perfect, and a lot of data is is hidden under cover of SEO-pulled-out results, so in more advanced searches people just have to use other search engines. Secondly, there are countries where native search engines are more popular, for example (Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia). Even considering only US market it doesn’t look probable, mainly for the sake of so-called invisible hand, and too big value of whole market for no competitor wanting to get a piece of it.

It is also interesting, if in October there was any significant growth in the number of queries (it is probable that there was one connected with financial crises - like in other important moments people just wanted to learn something more). If there was such a growth, these results might be a little bit blurred - Google as a most popular search engine would take advantage of it by having its results multiplied, especially when shown as percentage.

-mw

P.S. As Hitwise marks: Results are based on four-week rolling periods (ending Nov, 1, 2008; Sep. 27, 2008; and Oct. 27, 2007) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. As MSN they counted searches executed on Live.com and MSN Search, but not the searches executed on Club.Live.com.