Wolfram|Alpha officially launched Monday – and by the looks of it, the computational engine is the nerdy kid the other kids only talk to when they need help with a physics exam, not a rival to the cool, well-rounded brainiac Google.

Take a look at the top 100 rising searches on Google via Google Trends. Here's a sample from Monday: ethan zohn, Swizz Beatz, cif southern section, eyebrow muscle, embarrassing family photos, whole body imaging, bachelorette, dachshund, west virginia governor, csk vs kkr, and heteropaternal superfecundation.

Wolfram|Alpha doesn't do a single one of those better than Google does. In fact, there's not one on the top 100 it does better than Google. Granted this is a skewed sample of pop culture-driven searches, but as a search engine you have to at least try.

The best one can say about Wolfram|Alpha in these results is the unintended humor in Wolfram's suggestion that "sausage hound" is a narrower term than dachshund.

Moreover, when Wolfram fails, it fails ungracefully.

Why didn't Wolfram contract with a search engine, say Yahoo or Dogpile or Altavista to take over the query when its computational engine fails? Instead, if Wolfram can't computer your query, it leaves you with a blank page. That's like talking to a robot that understands a few verbal commands. That's fun for a couple of minutes at a technology expo, but not something you want to do every day.

Perhaps a better model is for Wolfram to notice what searches work, publish them as static pages for Google to search and throw some display ads on the page. That way, if someone does want to know the mass of a proton divided by an electron, then Wolfram|Alpha's answer will be the top result in Google for that query.

The technology is quite nice, but Wolfram|Alpha's ability to crunch data and compile answers to a very narrow set of questions is a feature of a search engine – not a whole one to itself. Microsoft or Yahoo or Google will probably buy it at some point, and find a way to integrate it into more traditional search results.

In the meantime, if you want to see search results that are often better for popular queries look to Kosmix, which is spending more time figuring out how to present information, than how to solve physics equations. There's going to be a lot more money and friends in the former.

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