There’s a way in which the just-released iPhone version of Wolfram Alpha makes more sense than the web version. The web version suggests a Google-like general search engine, which it is not; it’s a “computational” or “fact engine” with a more limited range of use cases. It does what it does well — offer a range of data, calculations and statistics often in a graphical form — but often there are also no results or no directly relevant results for general or conventional search queries.

But holding Wolfram in your hand on the iPhone suggests a “calculator,” which it more closely resembles (especially with the additional keys pictured on the home screen). In addition, there’s a good deal of instruction on how and when to use it, together with example queries and associated results.

I found in testing it over the weekend that I would be much more inclined to use the iPhone version than the online version of the engine. I would even say it was more “fun.” As an added bonus, you can also get access to Google search through the iPhone Wolfram; every result gives users the option to “search the web” (via Google) for any query entered.

But rather than the user experience or capabilities, most people writing about the app today seem to be focused on the app’s price: $49.99. I asked Wolfram’s PR people what the rationale behind the pricing was in an email. Here was what they said:

$49.99 is basically less than 1/2 the price of a graphing calculator with inferior functionality in comparison, which is how the company came to that number. Or, as we’ve been saying, the price of 12 lattes from Starbucks…

Also, looking at the other apps that are $50+, we think that we’re of at least comparable in utility and functionality, if not more. And, part of what the company is also doing is making a statement about the non-trivial nature of WolframAlpha’s capabilities, what we are bringing to the iPhone in terms of making it a more useful device, and how much the system has matured since launch.

When internet radio purveyor Pandora launched its iPhone app it transformed the company and sent it on the road to mainstream visibility and increased revenues. A similar though less spectacular gain might be in order for Wolfram, but for the price. Nonetheless the $50 price tag was a bold statement about the value of the app. And there may be some discounting in the future. We’ll have to wait and see.

By the same token the price has certainly gotten everyone’s attention and thus probably generated more coverage than the app might otherwise have if it had been free. I don’t think that was part of the plan exactly but it may work to get more people to take a closer look . . . and a few of them to shell out the big money.

Consumers care about online reviews; small businesses (SMBs) care about what’s being said about them online. Most small businesses that are aware of the phenomenon of online reviews (and care) try to monitor those reviews by using a search engine or alerts with their business name. They also visit specific sites like Yelp or Citysearch to see what’s being said about them. It’s an awkward process that is time consuming, but increasingly necessary.

Large corporations have had various “buzz tracking” tools at their disposal to monitor “brand chatter” but these have not been available for SMBs. Marchex has now created a comprehensive reputation management tool aimed at the SMB market that enables monitoring of virtually everything being said about them online via a single dashboard. I’ve seen the demo and it’s a very impressive offering. The search tie-in is that the tool is built on top of Marchex’s OpenList search and reviews aggregation technology. During the beta period SMBs can get direct access but after that it will apparently only be available through Marchex’s partners (e.g., YellowPages.com) and not directly to SMBs. I think that’s unfortunate because it’s a valuable tool and service that SMBs would directly pay for.

The press release summarizes the content and data being collected:

Marchex Reputation Management was built using proprietary local search technology from Marchex’s Open List local search network. Covering more than 8,000 sources and currently containing more than a quarter billion pieces of meta-data, Marchex Reputation Management monitors and reports on a specific business’ online footprint, including its user reviews and news, blog and social media mentions. In addition, Marchex Reputation Management ensures the accuracy of information in existing online business listings found on general search sites, local search sites and directories, such as consistent business name, address and phone numbers, as well as making recommendations as to where to add new listings for more coverage. This information is refreshed daily.

Marchex Reputation Management blends Marchex’s heritage in local search with its proven ability to partner and deliver local advertising solutions. Specific features include:

• Reviews: Charts break out the percentage of positive, neutral or negative reviews in an easy-to-read display.
• Mentions: Charts demonstrate activity by reviews or mentions to tie the information back to particular changes in the business or marketing efforts by month.
• Business listings: Ensure business listings are accurate and visible on top online consumer destinations.
• Keyword identification: Top keywords and phrases are highlighted to identify the terms that differentiate the business and act as an alert to any customer service issues.
• Competitive marketing analysis: Compare a business to other local businesses to analyze how its reputation and marketing efforts stack up.
• Ability to engage: Share positive news and reviews with customers and employees through email, Twitter, Facebook, Digg or other sources.

The tool can be used to determine where business listings exist online and how consistent and complete they are; but it’s most valuable, as the name suggests, to track reviews and what’s said about a business. SMBs can also compare themselves to others and direct competitors. And there’s the ability to share reviews via Twitter, Facebook, etc, which takes this beyond simply a monitoring tool into the realm of outbound marketing:

I spoke with Marchex EVP of Product Engineering Matthew Berk, whose OpenList was acquired by Marchex in 2006 and is the basis of this tool, and he said that SMBs in the beta test are figuring out that they can use this not only for monitoring of reviews but also to glean information for later marketing purposes. It has long been the case that proactive SMBs have used online reviews to improve their service or identify problems but there hasn’t been an easy way for them to get all the relevant information in a single tool or dashboard.

GetListed does a good job of helping businesses identify where they show up online and provides a number of services for SEO purposes. But in terms of monitoring online ratings and reviews of local businesses and building a suite of services around that, there isn’t anything else in the market (to my knowledge) that does this.

This year, we’ve seen several ambitious new efforts to mine and make searchable the vast part of the web that remains largely hidden to search engines—often referred to as the deep, hidden or invisible web. The latest foray into the reaches of hidden web is actually a hybrid, of sorts: Factual, founded by Gil Elbaz, who previously built the foundational technology that enabled Google’s leap to world domination in search (Elbaz sold his company Applied Semantics to Google in 2003; it was the genesis of what we know as AdSense today).

Factual is a self-described “open data repository.” Like Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that launched earlier this year, Factual seeks to create order from chaos by allowing anyone to share and mash open data on any subject, structuring information in database-like tables.

Unlike Wolfram Alpha, which is a closed system with data “curated” by employees, Factual has adopted a Wikipedia-like model which allows anyone to create, structure or even edit data in Factual tables. Elbaz hopes this open model will encourage community participation, enabling Factual to grow rapidly and enjoy widespread adoption.

“Our aspiration is to build the largest structured data repository,” says Elbaz. “We already have 100,000 tables created but we hope to capture the community’s interest.”

The trouble with the web

Why do we even need these new “non-search engines” like Factual and Wolfram Alpha? What do they offer that Google doesn’t?

Google is very good at two things: helping us navigate to a web site that we can then explore to satisfy a need, and at surfacing basic, relatively simple facts. What Google—and every other traditional search engine, for that matter—has trouble with is finding or manipulating larger collections of data, or responding intelligently to more complex queries.

Why? Largely because the web isn’t like a database—it’s highly unstructured and there are few standards for how information should be organized for optimum efficiency. Google’s huge challenge lies in making sense out of this chaotic disorder. It does this by literally downloading as much of the web as it can, creating a massive index and then trying to find needles in its own haystack.

While this process works well, it also has limitations. For example, there’s a vast amount of information that’s web-accessible, but not directly a part of the web. Much of this information is contained in databases, and databases only divulge their information when queried—when people type words into their forms, tick check boxes or use drop-down menus to limit or filter results. As good as Google is at understanding open web content, it struggles to access this “deep” or “invisible” web content, largely because Google can’t easily interact with the user interfaces of databases. (Google is experimenting with structured data, most notably with Google Squared and Fusion Tables, but these are Google Labs projects and don’t appear to be major initiatives for mainstream search.)

Factual takes a different approach. Like Wolfram Alpha, Factual’s staff works to upload facts from publicly available information sources. Like Google, Factual also mines the web for data, but selectively, rather than comprehensively. Factual also accepts data submissions from users and developers.

And like Wikipedia, Factual allows anyone to edit its data.

Wait! How can “facts” be “editable?”

Wikipedia has evolved, over time, into an authoritative reference that’s on a par with some of the most trustworthy paid sources of information. But since anyone can edit Wikipedia articles, the site has drawn well-deserved criticism when some users altered or distorted facts, used articles to spin reputations or otherwise corrupted the integrity of Wikipedia content.

Factual is allowing registered users to edit data, but rather than adopting Wikipedia’s “edit and replace” model, Factual lets people add information to a table without overwriting or deleting existing data. It then uses a consensus-based model to settle on the most authoritative facts to display. Elbaz says this makes it difficult to impossible for a charlatan to corrupt data with incorrect entries. Elbaz wrote on a blog post today:

“Factual wants to bring true accountability to data. Accountability means anyone can easily contribute their opinion, substantiate the data or disagree with the data. Accountability means full transparency and history in regards to how this data was originated (e.g. citations or explanations).”

Using Factual

Although Elbaz told me “we’re not a search engine—the goal isn’t to be a search engine,” searching is still one of the best ways to get started with Factual. You’ll find a search box at the upper right of every Factual page, and you can use it just like you would Google.

Search results, however, are very different. Because Factual is searching data, you’re presented with the name of data tables, along with the fields in the table. You can sort results by relevance, table name, last updated, author, views, rows or user rating. Once you click through on a result, the table is displayed very much like an Excel spreadsheet.

For example, look at this List of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. Compare it to the Wikipedia article from which the data was extracted to see how Factual has constructed the table and allows you to manipulate it in various ways.

Want to use this table—or a table of your own—on your own website? No problem—Factual makes it easy to embed a table into your own site or blog (here’s a three minute video that shows you how).

And if you have the technical chops, you’ll love Factual’s developer tools that let you create mashups from existing data sources on the web, combining different facts into interesting searchable sites, like this search app that helps you sort through restaurants in Los Angeles based on multiple attributes.

Factual is one of a new breed of search tools that are partially solving the invisible web problem. It isn’t a replacement for Google, but rather a really interesting, useful place to turn when Google just isn’t doing it for you. And I expect as Factual grows and matures, it’s going to become ever more useful.

At Applied Semantics, Elbaz and team built the world’s largest database of words and meanings, which was subsequently folded into Google. With Factual, the goals are much bigger and more ambitious. Elbaz: “Why should I limit myself to words and meanings? Why not go for all human knowledge?”

The Six Revisions blog complied an excellent list of the classic search engines, some dating back to the 1990s. His list includes screen shots of both the old and current (if available) versions of HotBot, Excite, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Ask.com, Yahoo, Google, Dogpile, AltaVista, Lycos, MSN Search, Bing, AOL Search, Infoseek, Go.com, Netscape, MetaCrawler, and All The Web.

Scrolling down the list and looking at some of those old screen shots bring back fun memories. Of course, there are many search engines missing, too many to list there or even here. But looking at the old screen captures of Google, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista reminds me of the simpler days in search.

Which was your favorite old search engine?

This Friday, I was one of the million people to get a new iPhone 3GS. After getting through my activation issues I had some time to test out the new search feature on the iPhone, named Spotlight (from Apple OS).

With the new iPhone, you can have an unlimited number of applications, so finding those applications, including finding data in the core Apple iPhone applications, can sometimes be a struggle. Apple hopes that the new iPhone Spotlight search feature will ease the problem of finding things on your iPhone. Here is a quick how to with the iPhone search feature.

(1) Accessing Spotlight search on your iPhone:

You can access the search feature on your iPhone in three ways. You can slide the screens from right to left until, so that you move the home screen to the right. Or you can click the home button twice and it will activate the Spotlight feature on your iPhone.

(2) Search on Your iPhone:

After you launch the Spotlight feature, a search box comes up, with a keyboard. You can begin typing your query into the box and Apple will show search results categorized by application. Here are some screen shots showing how Apple is searching through:

• Application’s by first, last or company name
• Mail by to, from and subject lines
• Calendar items by event titles, invitees, and locations
• iPod by music (songs, artists, and albums) and the titles of podcasts, video, and audiobooks
• Notes, the full text of notes

Clicking on the search results will open them in their native application.

(3) Customizing Spotlight Search for iPhone:

You can also customize the search results that Spotlight returns. You can specify which applications are searched and the order in which they’re searched. To do so, go to Settings on your home screen, click on “General” and then click on “Home.” Then scroll to the bottom and click on “Search Results.” Yes, Apple hides the search preferences deep down in there. Then you can reorder or uncheck the applications you want searched. Here is a screen capture:

To reorder the search results, just place your finger on the horizontal bars on the right of the application and drag them up or down.

This morning there are two new entrants in the “real-time” search derby, run by two search veterans. They are CrowdEye and Collecta. CrowdEye is from Ken Moss, who ran search engineering at Microsoft and built the new engine himself. At the helm of Collecta is Gerry Campbell, who was a search executive at AOL and Reuters, as well as an adviser to Summize (now Twitter Search). He recently stepped into the CEO role at the company.

The two new engines join an growing field of competitors, including Topsy, OneRiot, Tweetmeme and Scoopler, not to mention Twitter Search itself. Then there’s Facebook, which is testing an upgraded internal “real-time” search capability, and Google, which has all but formally announced that it’s getting into the segment.

CrowdEye is indexing Twitter Tweets and pulling out relevant third party links and related queries. Here’s an example for Iran Election:

In the upper left are editorially selected, related queries. They will become dynamically generated over time. The tag cloud in the middle features terms pulled from Tweets about Iran Election, that initiate new searches. The chart above the tag cloud shows activity over a three-day time frame. You can click on the bars and drill down into the activity stream at a given time or hour. In the upper right, “popular links” are third party links that the Tweets reference, algorithmically selected for relevance.

Moss told me that this is “V1″ and he sees it expanding in numerous ways: more data sources, a wider than three day time window and so on. Right now Moss isn’t building an archive or index longer than three days and is thinking about what to do with older material as it accumulates.

Collecta, for its part, is already drawing upon a range of data that include Twitter but also blogs, articles, Flickr and other sources:

On Collecta, the left pane enables users to select sources and “shape results,” according to Campbell who says that he wants to add more filtering and “shaping” capabilities in the future.

The middle pane offers a real-time vertical scroll (which can be paused) that moves down the page as new content appears. The right panel is a preview pane.

Campbell makes a distinction between “real-time search” and “timely search.” He contends that Collecta is currently the only real-time search site, pushing content to users from the various sources it draws upon in less than a second after it appears online.  CrowdEye’s Moss says that results appear on the site essentially as they’re being published, on Twitter via the API.

I asked both Campbell and Moss about use cases and whether “ordinary searchers” would understand how to use these engines. Campbell said that “events” and “places” were the primary use cases for the time being — Iran Election is an example of both. Yet both Campbell and Moss expressed optimism that “real-time search” will become a mainstream activity in the relatively near future.

Regardless the segment is arguably the hottest in search and there is now a pack of startups that claim to offer “real-time search” capability with Google and Facebook circling overhead. The concentration of activity in the space probably means that it is here to stay and that it will become a part of traditional search — although Moss believes it’s a vertical and won’t be building a complete web index.

Among the differences between traditional search and these new search competitors, we can expect them to evolve and “iterate” very quickly. After all, they’re playing in real time.

Searchme has rolled out what it calls “true” blended search results, combining web, video, images, music and Twitter results organized by their relevance and playable inside the search results page. Searchme displays results as small versions of entire web pages, in a format that looks just like the “cover flow” display in iTunes.

I love Searchme as a “recall engine,” using it to find web pages or sites that I’ve previously visited but can’t remember the site name or URL. The visual display of results, with the ability to quickly scroll through mini-versions of pages makes it easy to recognize sites that I’ve already seen.

I also love Searchme’s music search capabilities. Through an arrangement with iMeem, you can play entire songs, directly from the music search result page. It’s a great way to decide whether you want to buy a song from iTunes or Amazon (both of which only let you hear 30 second snippets of songs).

Searchme also offers a sort of “visual bookmarks” feature called “stacks” that let you save pointers to content you want to revisit.

Searchme likely won’t replace your regular search engine, but it offers enough really cool and useful features that you’ll want to add it to your web search arsenal.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use a search engine without needing to touch your mouse? You know, type your query and then scan and even click through to results without actually clicking the mouse button? Or maybe you’re looking for an alternate source of search advertising data, like how many advertisers are bidding on certain keywords. Or maybe you’re into something more mundane, like finding an apartment to call home.

In this roundup of five search tools you may not know about, I’ll introduce you to possible answers to those questions and a couple more. This is the third in my occasional series that profiles under-the-radar search tools. If you missed the previous two, links to those are at the end. But let’s start with that mouse-free search tool….

keyboardr

For some, the computer mouse is nothing more than an inconvenience. Take my hand off the keyboard? No thanks! keyboardr was invented for people like that. It’s a meta search engine that pulls in results from Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube.

Results begin to appear on the page as you type a query, and once you’re done, the mouse is unnecessary. You can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate from one search result to the next, and hit Enter to open the result in a new window.

AdQuants

This one is for the search marketing crowd. AdQuants is a tool that offers competitive research related to any keyword or URL you provide. If you use or have seen SpyFu, you’ll be familiar with what AdQuants does. (One difference is that AdQuants is a free service that aims to make money via custom research.)

The screenshot shows an AdQuants search for “sunscreen,” and the data includes the number of advertisers bidding on that term, and estimates for average CPC, average daily clicks, and related information.

Tweepz

You might be thinking that we don’t need another Twitter search engine, but Tweepz is a bit different from ones I’ve come across, and it’s already helped me find new people to follow. It’s a search tool to find Twitter users, and it offers more functionality than I’ve seen in other Twitter user search engines. One option is to search based on location, and Tweepz quickly found several people local to my area that I’d never found on other Twitter search sites.

After doing a search you can sort your results by number of followers, number following, or join date. In the right column, there are additional refinements and an RSS feed for your search results. In addition to location-based search, Tweepz lets you search Twitter member names and bios. Good stuff.

123people.com

Whether you’re searching for another person, or searching on your own name, you might be impressed with the wide variety of data that 123people.com pulls together on a single page. A search for my name includes photos (from Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and other sources) … email addresses (mine, and some from other Matt McGees) … phone numbers (not mine, thankfully) … web links … videos … blog posts and news articles mentioning my name … the Amazon page selling my U2 book and my Amazon wish list … and much more.

If you’re searching for a common name, 123people.com lets you narrow your search by including a city name or zip code. There are a few too many advertisements on the search results page for my taste, but it’s still an interesting people search engine.

MyApartmentMap

MyApartmentMap is a search mashup that pulls in apartment rental data from online classified sites and color codes them by price on a Google Maps interface. The site promises “up to the minute reports” for the entire U.S. The interface includes a drag-and-drop marker (see below) that simplifies the process of finding apartments by price in specific cities and neighborhoods.

The search results pages also show average apartment rental prices for the most recent month, as well as a chart showing 6-month trends for rental prices. Based on a few searches I did, the data appears to be quite good in bigger cities but more hit-and-miss when you get to smaller locales.

UPDATE: FanSnap, an event ticketing search engine I profiled previously in this series, is now out of beta. New features since our previous mention include the ability to see available tickets by zooming to row level at venues, as well as a partnership that adds available tickets from eBay into FanSnap’s search results.

See also:

• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

The highly anticipated Wolfram Alpha search engine made its debut today, although Google tossed in a little spoiler.

The webcast was apparently difficult for some to view, but you can get impressions of what happened from Between The Lines and Bits.

The site also has a new blog and Twitter account, and we’ll be looking at it more closely in the near future ourselves.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

Postscript: See Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”, our review of the service.

After covering search for 13 years, I’m more than a little jaded. I’ve seen any number of search start-ups promise to revolutionize how we search. None of them have in the huge way they’ve promised, other than Google — and it’s a special case. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been watching Wolfram Alpha walk the same hype path so many have followed before. So I thought I’d offer a little advice, for what it’s worth. Here’s how to set your search service up for a disappointing fall.

1) Fail to brief those in the know: First I heard of Wolfram Alpha was on Techmeme back in March. The company made no outreach to me. Big headed? Sour grapes? Hey, I haven’t seen John Battelle mentioning having talked to them, either. Nor have I seen anyone who regularly writes about search having said they know about the service. Last week, I even put in a press request for a briefing. Haven’t heard back. My takeaway when those who regularly cover search aren’t in the know? The company isn’t that clued in about search (given they haven’t done the basic research about who they should talk to) or they are clued in and are purposely avoiding the regulars who won’t be dazzled by controlled demos.

2) Use controlled demonstrations: The biggest red flag of a new service is when they trot out set examples of searches they say show how much better they are over the competition. This was a Powerset hallmark, and it’s been used by many others over the years. It’s the equivalent of running a poll where you’ve slanted all the questions to get the answers you want. Controlled demos mean that a service can pick-and-choose questions where it knows it excels. In turn, that can get some journalists believing that the new service really is better than existing ones. Then when it goes public, and has to face millions of queries that aren’t hand selected, it falls way short of expectations.

3) Claim you’re the “next Google” or fail to set expectations: Some companies are stupid enough to honestly believe they’ll unseat Google. Microsoft, spending hundreds of millions, hasn’t been able to knock people off the Google habit. A start-up just isn’t going to do the same. Google did it because of a unique moment. Search was a loss-leader, so the major search engines stopped focusing on quality. Now that search is a billion dollar industry, the focus is sharp. Some companies don’t explicitly say they’re going to beat Google but they allow others to do that on their behalf. Wolfram Alpha promises a “new paradigm.” Another review, following what I’m pretty sure was a controlled demo, tells me “most of us” will be using Wolfram Alpha by default. The story that broke the news about Wolfram Alpha specifically avoids calling it a Google killer but still suggests it will be as important as Google. When Wolfram Alpha does debut, it has huge expectations to meet. And chances are, it’ll fail to do so.

4) Trot out big names with no connection to search: A number of start-ups, over the years, have tried to prove they must be good by listing investors who made their names in other fields. I generally don’t care who has invested in you (unless you’ve got an investor with a track record of good search choices). The fact you’ve gotten investment doesn’t even reassure me, given my sad faith in the homework of most investors. Usually, when that’s your selling point, it’s a red flag you don’t have an actual product that’s compelling. (Postscript: Matt Cutts pointed out a classic example of this, when Bill Clinton was trotted out as the spokesperson for Accona

5) Offer me or anyone an “exclusive” to break your launch: I like being prebriefed. It helps in crafting a more detailed story for my readers. And sure, I like to break news as much as any journalist. But when a pitch overtly suggests that I can have the scoop over others, that tells me you’re not trusting enough in your product to let a variety of people review it. You’re hoping to control the story too much. It also tells me that you think I’m stupid enough to agree in advance to give your product heavy play even though it may not deserve it. For more, see my post, Embargoes, Prebriefings & Exclusives.

Search Engine Mouthfeel

These thoughts are also on my mind because earlier this week, I visited Blekko, another “stealth” search engine in development. I can’t go into detail about what I saw, but I was impressed. More important, the red flags aren’t going off. I got to search for whatever I wanted on Blekko. There was no controlled list of queries I had to do. There was no claim to be ready to topple Google. More than anything else, Blekko had good mouthfeel when I used it.

You know when you eat or drink something, and it feels just right in your mouth? That’s mouthfeel. I realized this week that search engines have mouthfeel, too. It’s an intangible thing where they just feel right or not. When I search on Google, it just feels right. On Yahoo, sort of. On Live Search, there’s no mouth feel. For some reason, the layout, the mixture, maybe the name — I don’t know. They just don’t feel right.

Microsoft’s Hype Challenge

Microsoft faces its own hype challenge, of course. A brand change is expected later this year, along with a new look and features. Microsoft is definitely taking on Google, but after years of failure — and some past pronouncements that it would soon beat Google — the company now has to diligently control the hype and continue stressing the long game it is playing. Otherwise, when it fails to gain huge market share six months after the relaunch — which almost certainly be the case (unless it buys Yahoo’s traffic) — there will be disappointment over how it failed to “beat” Google once again rather than positive attention on any smaller by significant gains it might make.

Waiting For Wolfram Alpha

As for Wolfram Alpha, it might be amazing when it comes out (Tim O’Reilly tells me I’ll be impressed, and I count his opinion pretty highly). But if so, it will go against the odds. So far, it just keeps tossing up the red flags on my list that lead to disappointment.

We’ll get a better idea on Tuesday, when a public sneak preview is being offered. If you watch the webcast, just keep asking yourself how controlled are the questions? Will the audience be able to suggest searches on their own? And how do those measure against the types of searches a typical search engine handles?

Knowing only things from afar, my guess is that Wolfram Alpha (which desperately needs a better name, another red flag) will be impressive in a niche that’s separate from what the existing search engines do. Not a replacement, and probably not a service that will attract a mass audience. But that’s not bad, if it does pan out that way. That’s still providing an important service, and potentially a profitable one. Not everyone has to be Google to be successful in search.

Postscript: There are some excellent comments below, along with some healthy discussion here on FriendFeed. The two main themes tend to be (1) am I just whining that I didn’t get briefed? and (2) Wolfram Alpha isn’t a search engine similar to Google. In fact, it’s a different creature altogether.

Sure, I suppose I’m whining. But the points above aren’t in order of importance, nor is it a case that Wolfram Alpha or any service that doesn’t do well has followed all of them. Instead, these are various types of red flags that go off for me, along with others (such as some relevancy signals you can see or interface issues, when you first use a service).

It’s not that I have to be briefed — it’s more that if I don’t see anyone who regularly covers search talking about a service, that’s usually not a good sign.

I don’t mean to sound big headed or insular in saying this. I’m just telling people that’s a regular sign I see of companies that aren’t that clued in, a sign that I tend to be sensitive to because of the unique position I’m in.

Being briefed doesn’t mean a company will succeed, of course. I have talked with plenty of companies ahead of time that think they’re going to be the next Google but fail. But usually, there are other red flags that have also gone off.

As for Wolfram not positioning itself as the next Google, certainly it suggested it was bringing in a new paradigm of searching. And reviews from those who have been briefed come away suggesting it could rival Google or be a service regularly used. So far, I don’t recall those services stressing this as something just for scientists. In fact, Rudy Rucker’s review gives queries such as “temperature in los gatos” as examples of what it solves — a query which, if you do it on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, gets solved pretty well now. Rucker’s article also ends with Stephen Wolfram saying:

It will raise the level of scientific things that the average person can do.  People will find that the world is more predictable than they might have expected.  Just as running Google is like having a reference librarian to help you, running Wolfram|Alpha will be like having a house scientist to consult for you.

That’s not saying this is just for scientists. That’s saying Wolfram Alpha is specifically for “average people,” though qualified that they’ll want to use it for “scientific things.” Well, time and again, we’ve seen that “average people” don’t turn to specialized search engines to do specific tasks, not in mass numbers. Instead, they still go to the major players and try to make them perform. So yeah, it looks to me that Wolfram Alpha has some expectation problems they’re likely to face, and some that they’ve created directly themselves.

That doesn’t mean, as I said below, this won’t be a great service — or attract a key audience — or necessarily will have a problem with those expectations. So far, the business model seems non-existent. They may not need nor want mass numbers. But they will get compared to Google, and if they want to avoid looking like a failure if six months down the road they’ve failed to gain Google-like traffic (much less Microsoft-like traffic), then they need to do a better job of positioning what this service is and who it is for.

Too harsh when they haven’t even launched? No. Back in March, red flag #5 went off — an exclusive preview that positioned the service as something amazing that was coming. That review just didn’t happen — reviews like that don’t. Wolfram Alpha would have authorized the author to write, because they wanted a message to get out. That doesn’t mean the author necessarily delivered the message they wanted, but certainly there was little follow up I saw afterward to suggest they weren’t somehow going to be as important as Google.

But Monday will be an important new step. We’ll see more about what the service really is and how they hope to position themselves.

Postscript 2: See Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”, my review of the service which, as the headlines says, is indeed impressive. It also covers how it still is unlikely to be a Google-killer and the challenges to gain widespread use, though it has a better chance than many specialty services I’ve seen.