Today marks the official launch of Wolfram Alpha, which is a mathematically based “computational knowledge engine” that derives some of its datasets from the web. Most news outlets will refer to it as a search engine, but the distinction is important:

Traditional search engines, like Google and Yahoo, seek to index pages on other websites and direct their searchers to these pages. Wolfram Alpha’s goal is quite different – it seeks to extract data from other sources to create a massive internal database, which it will then use to answer its searchers’ questions directly. Where Google and Yahoo serve as middlemen directing searchers to relevant properties, Wolfram Alpha contains all of its answers to its own website.

This brings about Wolfram Alpha’s key difference: it will compute answers that do not appear on the source websites. For instance, you can ask Wolfram Alpha for a ratio of the populations of the United States and China, and it will graph the answer over time. The resulting graph is not scraped from another website, but rather generated by Wolfram Alpha. To be sure this is the case, try comparing two totally unrelated statistics, like the calories in a Snickers bar compared to the height of the Empire State building:

Totally amazing, but to be sure this is not a “Google Killer,” and was never intended to be. Wolfram Alpha is fantastic at providing answers to a specific set of queries, but will not even attempt to answer queries it does not understand or have data for. Whereas Google will bring back something for nearly any query, and chances are high the answer is contained within the set of results. For instance, consider the query “average home price in Raleigh, NC” on the two engines:

Wolfram Alpha:

Google:

Although neither engine knew the answer directly, Google’s first result does: $177,902.

That said, Wolfram Alpha is still incredibly powerful and entertaining. If you’re interested in science and math, you’ll spend hours playing with it (its already taken up most of my day!).

Bonus: Fun Queries to try on Wolfram Alpha

How much paint would you need to cover the moon (in gallons)? Answer

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Answer

GATTACA: Answer (Alpha is a ton of fun if you’re into genetics – try typing in other common DNA sequences)

How much is one astronomical unit expressed in Robert Wadlows? Answer (Robert Wadlow is the tallest man on earth, according to the Guinness Book of World Records)

Where am I? Answer

If you find other interesting queries or Easter Eggs let us know in the comments and we will add them to this list!

Many of these were found on the new AlphaInputs subreddit. Drop by it if you’re looking for more fun queries for Wolfram Alpha.

The ads promote 3 services that we’ve seen so far:

1. Tweetie, a Twitter client for iPhone
2. Twittervision, a mashup showing live tweets on a Google map thats been around for quite a while
3. Exec Tweets, a new directory and tweet aggregator of selected business executives

The third site, ExecTweets, is the most interesting in terms of Twitter’s business model. Its a new site created by John Battelle’s Federated Media and sponsored by Microsoft. It aggregates tweets from the leaders of big brand companies like eBay, digg, and Zappos, with a user voting system built in to help prioritize the stream.

Its a great fit, as Mr. Battelle has been teaching us about conversational marketing for some time and defending Twitter’s value before everyone else seemed to get it. Federated Media sells ad inventory for sites popular with the early adopter crowd such as TechCrunch, digg, and boingboing, so they should know how to market to Twitter’s current audience. We haven’t been able to find any details as to whom is paying whom for what, but its safe to assume that the privilege did not come cheaply.

One thing that is sure to raise some eyebrows amongst the SEO community is that the ad links are dofollowed (i.e. not nofollowed). The ads are embedded in the site’s HTML, not loaded by external Javascript files, so they will be indexed by search engine crawlers. Considering the enormous domain authority of Twitter and the fact that nearly every other external link on twitter.com is nofollowed, these links could pass a lot of PageRank.

More coverage of the new partnership can be found on the official Twitter blog, Battelle Media, and Venture Beat.

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