Who said Google Squared will kill Wolfram Alpha?

About 3-4 months ago one of my coworkers emailed me about this amazing computational engine - Wolfram Alpha (still in beta at that time). And this engine really awed me with its computational abilities. Some of the search terms did bring some blank results though but that was expected as a lot of data was being fed to the Wolfram servers at that point.

A few days ago when I heard about the deal between Bing and Wolfram (Bing strikes licensing deal with Wolfram Alpha) it occurred to me to check the site again and to see what other bloggers are writing about Wolfram.

I searched for articles and blog posts on Wolfram and came across this article on TechCrunch - What Is Google Squared? It Is How Google Will Crush Wolfram Alpha. 

If you look at the date this article was written, I think you can guess that author was speculating at that point because both these technologies were just about to be launched. But I was wondering and wanted to ask the author - Have you even tried Google Squared?

Now that both these engines have matured I can say this out loud that Google Squared is a complete failure. I had doubts on the success of Google Squared right from the beginning.

If for some reason you are still in the stone age or yawning your way out of hibernation, here is a little info on Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha -

So what is Google Squared?

Google Squared extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. For more info on Google Squared check out this video - http://www.youtube.com/v/t2onuEXThPs

And what is Wolfram Alpha?

Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer.

For more info on Wolfram Alpha check out there site - http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Did Google Squared really killed Wolfram Alpha?

Well I think its really doesnt make any sense to compare the two. Wolfram is a computational engine whereas Google Squared is a spreadsheet with organized information picked from all over the web.

So what is Google Squared good for?

And that is what I am not sure of. We ran a test on both Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha and searched for the term - planets. And follow is the screen shot of the searches on Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha.

Google Squared returns a list of planets but along came some vague information which was related to Astronomy but not really what we were looking for.

Wolfram Alpha really turned out to be a winner here - Not only it returned a list of planets but also complete details for each planet and even there current sky positions from Toronto (from where the search took place)

We leave it on the readers to decide who killed whom, but for now we can say that Wolfram Alpha is a clear winner. What do you think? Please leave your comments and share your views with our readers.