There has been a lot of high profile media buzz about the launch of a new “search engine” Wolfram|Alpha in the build up to its launch today, and this is something that Emily touched upon a few weeks ago when looking at new search engines coming onto the market.
Wolfram|Alpha refer to themselves as a computational knowledge machine rather than “search engine” as is being said in a lot of the publicity around it.
Although you enter a search query into it Wolfram|Alpha in much the same way as a “normal” search engine, it is there that the similarity ends.
Traditional search engines index content, and through the use of an algorithm, determine which pages of content they have indexed are the most relevant results to the search query entered. There are all kinds of factors that determine a pages placement, such as Page Titles, Descriptions and other on page factors, as well as a large proportion of relevancy determined by the number of links and the words used in those links to a website.
The industry of Search Engine Optimisation was born to help people make their websites more relevant to the type of word that they would like to be found under, by ensuring that you maximise as many of the ranking factors that we are aware of around those terms in an effort to drive visitors and ultimately business to that website.
Wolfram|Alpha isn’t doing this – instead, it is trying to give searchers the answer to the query directly that they have entered into the search box. So it isn’t leading visitors from Wolfram|Alpha to the most relevant website for that search query, it keeps the users on the Wolfram|Alpha website and gives them the best information fitting to that search query. This engine really is suited more to information and data searchers than someone that is looking to buy something.
So – what impact does this have for search engine optimisation? The short answer is none at the moment – because with this new engine, you aren’t trying to get traffic from it relevant to your website – because it doesn’t link out to other web pages like the others do. This really is a knowledge search engine, so for most people that are doing SEO work, Wolfram|Alpha will have no impact, because that isn’t what they are trying to do. Whether or not this changes and evolves over time remains to be seen, but we will be keeping an eye on Wolfram|Alpha to see how it develops over time.
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