Wolfram|Alpha was launched in May 18th, 2009 by the team behind the software Mathematica. This revolutionary semantic search engine was designed by the scientist Stephen Wolfram as a result of his entire career and with a very ambitious goal: to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. The impact Wolfram|Alpha has made on the entire industry has been tremendous. The system was designed around four main pillars that have shaped the industry for many years to come:
- Curated Data. The computational engine uses terabytes of factual data that are sourced from all kind of datasets and manually curated by a team of experts, researchers and content curators. Getting data into a large graph has been W|A key to success.
- Dynamic Computation. When Wolfram|Alpha receives a user query, it interprets it by extracting all the relevant facts from its knowledge graph using a collection of tens of thousands of algorithms.
- Intuitive Language Understanding. Wolfram|Alpha starts using NLP to process the user input and to get the required context in order for the engine to respond.
- Computational Aesthetics. Wolfram|Alpha also changes significantly the way results appear in the SERP by introducing a completely a new approach to user-interface design. Results appear on a customized page made of widgets designed to display the computed knowledge of the computational engine.
Find out more about the story of Stephen Wolfram