Knowledgeistics

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

On May 18, the much-hyped new search (er, computational) engine Wolfram Alpha launched. My first impression is that it’s a great tool, but is nearly useless for market research of any sort.

That’s a pretty bold statement, but the key here is that Wolfram Alpha is emphatically NOT a search engine as we’re accustomed to. WA refers to itself as a Computational Knowledge Engine, which is actually pretty accurate. While that distinction gives it some exciting new capabilities, it also means that it won’t be replacing your favorite search engine anytime soon.

Wolfram Alpha is useful for doing things like pulling a quick poop sheet on a geography or population, or doing some relatively sophisticated calculation, correlation, and graphing of quantitative data. What it’s not good for is learning about any topic not already coded into the WA system. For example, while it can easily compare the nutritional content of Hot Dogs and Hamburgers, it chokes if you wander even a short way off the beaten path, having no idea what Deep Dish Pizza or Philly Cheese Steaks are.

The implications for market research, then, are essentially nil. While WA might be a good first stop to do groundwork on demographics or basic statistics, market research is not a computational exercise.

Wolfram Alpha is an awesome technology. The promise of Wolfram’s ambitious goals and substantial progress is exciting. Being able to compute basically anything without special software or tools would be of huge value. Unfortunately, WA is not going to save me much work when I need to learn qualitative facts about a market, company, product or brand. Now, Wolfram Gamma or Delta? I wouldn’t count them out.