14 DAY TRIAL // Wolfram|Alpha itself is an innovation to the world of search engines, but what it's done these past days just puts it at the top of marketing moves. The Wolfram|Alpha team launched the service out of Beta live on a Justin TV channel, and afterward Stephen Wolfram, its creator, answered questions relayed through a Twitter account and the channel's chat. For those who did not watch the live show, here is a short list of events that happened in the headquarters and questions answered in the interview.
The team, before launching the Wolfram|Alpha website to live testing on the Internet, performed a series of updates to the core Mathematica code that drives the search engine, and managed to avoid a severe power-outage to their computing clusters due to a huge power consumption surge in the system, caused by the update itself.
There were also some worries about an electric storm that passed over the region of their data center that could have caused some indirect problems to their power lines. After launching the service, more and more computer clusters were added throughout the rest of the day to help the search engine core with tests and live queries.
The broadcast also shows some interesting footage from inside their data center in their headquarters, with an Wolfram|Alpha engineer explaining how it all works.
The interview is as interesting as the live launch, with Stephen Wolfram disclosing that, right now, Wolfram|Alpha has managed to acquire about 5 million lines of Mathematica code. He also compared the search engine with a library shelf and pointed out that this would be just the beginning of their adventure, as they were planning multiple APIs, business apps, multimedia capabilities and linguistic updates.
For developers, this interview was a real treat with Stephen Wolfram explaining how all this code works together with Tomcat, Apache, JavaScript and AJAX technology. Be sure to check it out since many have considered him to be the modern-day Albert Einstein.
The Wolfram|Alpha service will be officially launched on Monday, September 21st 2009.
The live launch and Mr. Wolfram's interview are embedded in this page (they will expire in 6 months). The recorded Wolfram|Alpha launch broadcast can also be seen here. The recorded Stephen Wolfram interview can also be found here.