But when the service went live, it became apparent that Wolfram Alpha was a specialist tool for scientists. Though ingenious, it was all but useless if you just wanted everyday information about everyday topics.

Now, nine months later, the fuss has died down and Wolfram Alpha has settled into its scientific niche. It hasn’t acquired a database of Eurovision winners or CPU die sizes, and that’s fair enough. But while tinkering with it myself recently I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the things that Wolfram Alpha does turn out to know. To be fair, I’ve seen occasional reports of Wolfram Alpha “Easter eggs” in the past; but the examples below are all responses I’ve recently found through my own experimentation. And I’m certain there are many more gems just waiting to be discovered…

1. Who shot J.R.?

A straightforward question, and Wolfram Alpha gives a concise and informative answer. I admit I’m a little too young to really know who J.R. is, except that I have an idea he used to go about in a big hat. But at least I now know who shot him.

2. Who shot Mr Burns?

This one’s more meaningful to my generation, and again Wolfram is bang on the money. I like the way you can sort of see the engine’s working too, as it translates my question into a subject identifier. Oh, spoilers, by the way, if you’ve been in an isolation tank for a decade and a half.

3. Who wrote Jude the Obscure?

Now we just have to work out why.

4. What’s the real name of Ice-T?

I’m no psychologist, but do you think this might explain anything? If you ask for general information about Mr Marrow, Wolfram Alpha also reveals that the Original Gangster was born in New Jersey in 1958. And that’s word.

5. Why do birds suddenly appear?

I have to admit, I really didn’t expect this one to work; but Wolfram Alpha came up with the goods, and even neatly sidestepped the common pitfall of attributing the song wholly to the Carpenters.

6. Who let the dogs out?

The input interpretation suggests that this is a generic response, but if you ask who let the frogs out, or who let the air out of your tyres, you just get the old “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure” error. Oddly, Wolfram Alpha doesn’t seem to know about the contemporaneous, and slightly less dreadful, song “It Wasn’t Me”.

7. Are you talking to me?

Fun fact: apparently, the line “you talkin’ to me?” wasn’t in the script to Taxi Driver, and was improvised by Robert De Niro. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know that, but then neither did I (I learnt it from Wikipedia).

8. Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?

Outwardly, Wolfram Alpha presents itself as a scholarly computation engine, but deep down you know it got soul. RIP, Isaac.

9. Is the cake a lie?

Strictly speaking, it’s the graffiti that say the cake is a lie, which is later disproved; but since it’s a fairly confusing game we can forgive a small mix-up like this. Of course, with Portal 2 on the way who knows what further revelations await?

10. Does he look like a bitch?

Top marks to Wolfram Alpha for not stumbling on the vague reference to “he” and picking up the pop culture reference. It’s surprisingly coy about the b-word, though, especially since elsewhere it’ll happily define the word for you and even offer details of the feminist magazine of the same name.

11. What is love?

By this stage I was actually starting to get a bit creeped out by Wolfram Alpha’s apparent mind-reading ability. For my last try I thought I’d tax it with a real poser:

12. What kind of bear is best?

Game, set and match to Wolfram Alpha. Can you find any other surprising or amusing nuggets of information buried away in Wolfram Alpha’s knowledge banks? If so, please post them below!

You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search – Google kept on winning.

And the fact remains that, if you place a couple of search terms in Bing and in Google, the top 10 search results Google throws up are, more likely than not, going to be more relevant. This is a very difficult thing to test (any pedants needn’t worry about telling me of my misuse of the word “fact” in this paragraph), but I think most people would agree with that assessment.

What’s clever about the Bing approach is that it reduces the importance of those first ten results. For anyone unfamiliar with Bing, I should say that it not only returns a top ten list but also provides a handy shortlist of terms down the left-hand side.

So, earlier I did a search for Windows 7 (the screenshot that sits atop this page). Scrolling down that list produces a number of Microsoft sites, the Wikipedia entry, a review site, a YouTube video and a couple of very techie sites. But the likelihood is that someone typing in “Windows 7″ wasn’t looking for that.

In fact, they were probably looking for the topmost of the suggested searches of “Download Windows 7″; press that link and it performes the search. And, right at the top sits a link to Microsoft’s download site for Windows 7.

That on its own is quite a nice improvement, but when you enter a hardware product it becomes even more impressive. Enter the term “Apple iPhone” into bing.com – not www.bing.co.uk, which is still some way behind its American cousin – and you’ll find a series of prepared searches specifically for that product – Manual, Repair (is that Microsoft having a dig, I wonder?), Games, Accessories, etc. It’s neat and, in terms of getting most people where they want to go quickly, I think it’s more successful most of the time.

I’ve argued this point in a past PC Pro podcast, and was met with thinly disguised disgust, but I suspect the vast majority of the UK population – and possibly even a number of PC Pro readers – would prefer this method of searching rather than having to think of the precise three search terms to find the site or article they’re looking for.

So, to answer the original question my headline poses, could this be enough to kill Google? It’s incredibly unlikely. If I was in charge at Google HQ, I’d respond quickly by setting up a very similar feature myself – however much it might gall me to copy Microsoft at anything to do with search. And if pride stops them from fighting back in this way, I believe they will lose market share, and fast.

Am I foolishly misguided? I’ll erect my barriers against the oncoming verbal assault… either way, I’d be interested to know what people think.

Since Wolfram Alpha launched at the weekend, I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in which the author asks it inane questions and laughs when it falls flat. Even our own Darien Graham-Smith (along with several others in the office) seems almost delighted to prod and poke at it to find instances where Wolfram’s big pre-launch claims can be mocked – usually by comparison to Google or Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, this is something that was bound to happen given the publicity the site has received in recent weeks from the mainstream press. The big problem occurs because most people are attempting to hastily test the new engine without any real reason to be using it.

Without a specific scientific task in mind, most are instead racking their brains for the everyday queries they usually ask a search engine – or, worse, for deliberately obscure trivia facts – and are thus failing to use Alpha as it will surely be used once the first few months of fuss have passed: i.e. probably not by them.

The team have been quite open about the early stages of the project. The majority of critics would do well to note FAQ comments such as this: “We’ve first emphasized areas where computation or mathematics have traditionally had a more significant role, or where knowledge is more readily quantitative.”

Or this: “How much data does Wolfram Alpha have on popular culture? Basics, particularly about more computable issues, such as movie box-office grosses. More is being added.”

Of course, the winners of Eurovision are unlikely to have been high on the ‘computation or mathematics’ priority list, even less so as it’s an American team compiling the vast amount of data. To scoff and cite a Wikipedia page full of trivia as evidence of Wolfram Alpha’s failings is to miss the point of the tool completely.

It’s not meant to be Google. It’s not meant to be Wikipedia. If you can find out the biggest selling single of the nineties with a quick Wikipedia search, why on Earth wouldn’t you? On the other hand, if you search for the relationship between Microsoft and Apple on Wikipedia and Google your immediate result won’t look anything like this: (click to enlarge)

Be realistic about what Wolfram Alpha is. Instead of transplanting your day’s Google searches into it and mocking the lack of success, stick to those tasks for which, without all the media fuss, you would ever have even thought of using Wolfram Alpha. Google and Wikipedia will still be there for everything else.

I mean, obviously it was never going to slay Google on its first day. But after watching Stephen Wolfram’s pre-launch screencast I did believe it was at least going to be a credible alternative information source, offering authoritative and structured answers in a way no traditional search engine could aspire to.

Sadly, now Wolfram Alpha’s here it turns out that it doesn’t bloody know anything.

Depth rather than breadth

All right, let’s be fair: it actually does know quite a lot. If you try out the test queries, and your own variations on those themes, you’ll see that, actually, there is a remarkable amount of information stored up in the back-end.

But as soon as you start to stray outside of those specific areas of knowledge – and start asking it about things you’re actually interested in – the experience goes rapidly downhill.

Here are ten sample queries I’ve tried. To try to be fair, I’ve stuck to the sorts of information Wolfram Alpha is supposed to handle (as described in its FAQ): systematic, public, factual knowledge. And, just for comparison, I’ve made the same queries in Google and clicked on the first result. These were the results:

1. “House prices in Kentish Town”
Wolfram Alpha has never actually heard of Kentish Town. Maybe its existence isn’t public knowledge. Whatever the reason, this makes it pretty damn useless if you’re, say, looking for a new house within easy commuting distance of Dennis Towers.

The first hit on Google was a website detailing the asking and selling prices of houses sold in Kentish Town since 2000, along with trends and reports of how long they remained on the market.

2. “Biggest selling single of the 1990s”
Nineties chart-toppers may not be to everyone’s taste, but the facts and figures are (if you’ll pardon the expression) a matter of record. Sadly, Wolfram Alpha has none of them. It did, however, tell me that Shakira’s surname is Ripolli. Wouldn’t Graham-Smith suit her better?

The first hit on Google was a Wikipedia page telling me that the single in question was “Candle in the Wind 1997”, which reportedly sold a sickening 37 million copies.

3. “Newspaper circulations”
When I entered this as my query, Wolfram Alpha’s first guess was that I might want to know about Sports Illustrated. Second guess: The Idaho Statesman.

The first hit on Google was the Audit Bureau of Circulation. From here I had to engage in a little navigation, but after six mouse clicks I was rewarded with a list of UK national papers and their average net circulation.

4. “Bicycle theft in London”
As a recent victim of this heinous crime, I’ve been wondering how many bikes are stolen every day, where the hotspots are and where, if anywhere, they resurface. Unfortunately, to get any response from Wolfram Alpha at all I had to generalise this question down to just “bicycle”, at which point it told me that the modern bicycle was invented by John Kemp Starley.

The first hit on Google was a blog post advising me that expensive bikes are less likely to be stolen than cheaper ones. Not much consolation there.

5. “Eurovision winners”
After Norway attained the highest Eurovision score ever on Saturday, I started wondering about previous winners. Which countries had done best, and which worst, over the years? Wolfram Alpha guessed that perhaps I wanted to know about either the euro or the AAA Vision aircraft.

Google once again led me to the Wikipedia page on this topic, which offered all the information I could possibly want (and far more beside).

6. “CPU die sizes”
The original Pentium was built with a 0.8µm process. Now we’re down to 45nm chips, with 32nm on the horizon. Can Wolfram Alpha show me a graph of how die sizes have shrunk over time? No. It thinks “CPU” is an airfield in California.

Google’s first hit was an online article defining die size. I didn’t get the graph I wanted, but at least we were in the right industry.

7. “Web browser market share”
Admittedly the data on this one aren’t as solid as some of my other searches, but I was optimistic Wolfram Alpha would know something about web browsers. It doesn’t, but it did invite me to leave my email address so it could alert me when it does learn something on the topic.

For the third time, Google led me to an extensive and informative Wikipedia page, complete with a pie chart, a stacked line graph and numerous tables detailing the specific figures from the various data sources.

8. “UK unemployment 1980-2008”
For once, Wolfram Alpha did understand what I was asking… but alas it was unable to help due to “insufficient data available”. A few follow-up searches revealed that this is because it doesn’t have any data for any of those years. Oddly, though, if you leave off the year it gives you an estimate for 2008 (5.5%, if you’re interested).

The years threw Google off. It took me to an Amazon listing for a live DVD by a band named “The Inmates”, recorded in 1980 and released in 2008. A rare fumble.

9. “World Cup runner-up”
I tried several variations of these search terms, but Wolfram Alpha could tell me nothing more useful than the volume of a standard cup. Apparently, in the US it’s 0.2366 litres – I had to click onward to find the size of an imperial or metric cup. So much for tailoring results to your location.

Yet again, Google went straight to Wikipedia, this time to the FIFA World Cup page. I had to scroll down the page quite a lot to find the information I wanted, but it was there. (It was France.)

10. “Chemical symbol for tungsten”
“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” Oh, come on – really? Oddly, when I tried knocking off the word “chemical” it did yield the correct result, so I’ll give it half a point for that one.

With Google I didn’t even have to click on a link: the answer was right there above the search results, along with the source.

The verdict

Do you have to ask? Wolfram Alpha is clearly a very clever bit of programming, but if you actually want to learn something it’s next to useless.

All the same, we shouldn’t underestimate its potential. The engine that combines and presents arbitrary information in a comprehensible way is undeniably powerful. If it can only extend its ambit beyond institutional statistics and scientific formulae – if, in other words, it can start answering everyday questions about everyday topics – it could yet leave Google looking laughably primitive.

But before that can happen it needs more data. Lots more data.