Did Wolfram Alpha open the doors to Web 3.0?

[Ron Callari]

Scheduled to launch on May 18, and whether or not Wolfram Alpha is the next Google, do you think as a Semantic Web search engine, it opened the doors to Web 3.0? Review and comment with your feedback---> http://inventorspot.com/articles/next_google_27495

[Brian Fitzgerald]

Ron, didn't read your full article but have read a lot about Wolfram Alpha and played with it a lot. Seems like its more of a neat party trick right now and really only for a select group of users whose searches are answered by the type of answers Wolfram Alpha provides.

If the technology behind Wolfram is any indication then search engines will be moving more towards structured sources of data (which they have already started to do). This could eliminate or lessen their need for unformatted data and bring more importance and authority to a fewer number of sites than today. If you look at examples like XML sitemaps, Yahoo's Search Monkey and RDF formats those are some uses of formatted data sources.

Even Ask is doing this with more "semantic" type searches - http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=2417&o=0&l=dir&q=when+is+wi.... You can see for this search, which is a very normal way of asking a question, that they have partnered with Zap2It to provide results for when Will Ferrell is on TV this week.

[Ron Callari]

Hi Brian, thanks for feedback... I agree with you on all counts! We should only hope that this entre' into the Semantic Web gets better with time!

Regards, Ron

Brian Fitzgerald said:

Ron, didn't read your full article but have read a lot about Wolfram Alpha and played with it a lot. Seems like its more of a neat party trick right now and really only for a select group of users whose searches are answered by the type of answers Wolfram Alpha provides.

If the technology behind Wolfram is any indication then search engines will be moving more towards structured sources of data (which they have already started to do). This could eliminate or lessen their need for unformatted data and bring more importance and authority to a fewer number of sites than today. If you look at examples like XML sitemaps, Yahoo's Search Monkey and RDF formats those are some uses of formatted data sources.

Even Ask is doing this with more "semantic" type searches - http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=2417&o=0&l=dir&q=when+is+wi.... You can see for this search, which is a very normal way of asking a question, that they have partnered with Zap2It to provide results for when Will Ferrell is on TV this week.