About a quarter, or 25 percent, of all of Wolfram Alpha’s traffic now comes from Siri on the iPhone 4S, according to a report from the New York Times.
The fact that Siri has had such a large impact on Wolfram Alpha in only a few months not only proves iPhone customers are actually using Siri, but how useful Wolfram Alpha’s technology is. It may also prove a long-term threat for Google, as technologies like Siri could become a disruptive platform that stands between users and search engines.
I’ve always been interested in Wolfram Alpha because it’s called an answer-engine rather than a search engine. This implies that there isn’t a need to search — you just get what you asked for. I own an iPhone 4 so I don’t have access to Siri, but I’d be willing to bet I would use Wolfram Alpha much more often if I had an iPhone 4S. Its website, wolframalpha.com, isn’t exactly the easiest URL for beginners to remember. Plus, since Google, Bing, and the like are all baked into most web browsers, it’s more convenient to use those search engines.
Now the tables could be turning, as technology generally simplifies as it evolves over time. The next logical step for search engines is to remove the search part of it and just get users directly to the answer they are looking for. This isn’t a viable solution for every query, but Wolfram Alpha executes this in as many ways possible. Google should feel a little bit threatened by Siri and Wolfram Alpha. Combined, search engines can seem second-rate.