Wolfram Alpha Getting A Public Preview On Tuesday

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MG Siegler

TechCrunch.com
Friday, April 24, 2009; 3:11 PM

When it was first unveiled in March, Wolfram Alpha, a new type of search engine created by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, got a lot of buzz. Naturally, some people threw out the "Google killer" title ¿ but it seems to be a different beast, as it's all about knowledge search. That is to say, you ask a question, and you get an answer ¿ with Google, you ask a question and you get a link to a bunch of documents. That may sound a bit bland, and simplistic, but the select few who have seen it, seem to think it works really well and could be a game changer.

The rest of us won't know for sure until May, when it's scheduled to launch. But if you want to catch a glimpse of how it will work, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is hosting a webcast on Tuesday of an event with Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard. The sold-out event will be streamed live on the web at 3PM EST this coming Tuesday on this page.

And Harvard is calling for web users to participate in the preview by submitting questions, by @replying or direct messaging BerkmanCenter on Twitter during the event, or joining their IRC chat.