WolframAlpha

The launch of website WolframAlpha has been heralded as a replacement for Google. This is not so. The WolframAlpha site is trying something differently - it is trying to make information from different web sources combinable, and taking us closer to the semantic web ideal.

Instead of going to one website to get a piece of data, and then going to a second website to get a piece of data, and doing a calculation, WolframAlpha will do this for you using the best available sources of this information. It is made so you can make new information via correlation and creative combining of objective information.

Sites like Facebook do you want their content to be searchable and used by other sites otherwise they may lose advertising revenue.

The usefulness of combined data from different web sources will inevitably put pressure on sites like Facebook that keeps its site like an information silo.