Give us data porn, and lots of it

When you’re looking for a single fact or answer to something, a straight up Google search is probably your best approach. But what if you’re more interested in, say, a set of facts? Well you have two recently launched tools to help you untangle the web of information available.

Launched last month to much fanfare (but, unfortunately, to less critical acclaim), Wolfram Alpha is a computational search engine that crawls the Web to collect, parse, and curate all the data on the Internet “" certainly a lofty goal. The data used by Wolfram Alpha comes from government and public databases (think CIA Factbook, the NCBI, and Wikipedia). The power behind Wolfram Alpha comes from Mathematica, which helps it graph mathematical functions, maps, musical staves, and stock quotes among a seemingly endless list of possibilities.

While this sounds all well and good, it’s better just to look at some results. Try, for example, a search for the Boston Red Sox which returns a neatly formatted page of historical data as well as current standings. Or for the opposite end of the spectrum, something like a ham and cheese sandwich. (Who knew that a ham and cheese sandwich contains more riboflavin than 93% of foods out there?) For the molecular biologists among us, I highly suggest looking at amyloid beta precursor protein (known as APP) results. The financiers would likely be more interested in the stock quote for APP. Aerospace engineers, check out this NACA airfoil model. It truly is sheer data pr0n.

But Google is never one to be left out “" remember that time they’re went head to head with Amazon by selling e-books? “" and today they released Google Squared, which produces your results in a spreadsheet format. Spending a few minutes with it, you’ll quickly realize it’s nowhere near as powerful as Wolfram Alpha, but it has potential. For example, the Google square for the Sox lists how the players bat and throw, along with some images. You can add a category to the results as well from the suggestions (Pedroia only makes $500k a year?), or try picking a totally new one on your own. The pages for cheeses and planets are equally informative.

The major downside to these tools is that all the facts are represented in your results without their supporting websites. Every time you look at a website, you’re subconsciously judging the validity of the site. The more typos and blink tags you see, the less you tend to believe the fact presented there. While Google allows you to mouse over to see the specific source of the data, Wolfram Alpha offers only aggregate source listings. Considering the fact that Wikipedia is sometimes used as source, this is disconcerting. Of course, you can always go search the source information on your own, but you would probably use Google to do that, which will make you wonder why you didn’t just start there.

In any case, there any many searches on both sites that return no results at all. Google Squared fails particularly in most science and math related pursuits while Wolfram Alpha will pick seemingly random searches that it will have no idea what to do with. These tools are clearly in their infancy, but also could change the face of search in the future. For now, they’re mostly fascinating gimmicks.

They will also certainly decrease my productivity for a long time to come.