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Wolfram|Alpha officially launched – 2009

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

Read the full history of the SERP