A new search engine has hit the block. Its been dubbed a computational search engine. It finds results and displays them in interesting ways. Searching for a city provides details on where it is, what is population is, income levels etc. Searching for countries provides all kinds of cultural, geographic and demographic data. There’s chemical data, math formulas derived, words conjugated and explained.
I’m not trying to figure out if this is a game changer… I’m just trying to figure out how much of a game changer it is. For the scientific and engineering world, it could be a big one.
How Does it Differ from Google?
Wolfram Alpha and Google are very different animals. Google is designed to help people find Web pages. It’s a big lookup system basically, a librarian for the Web. Wolfram Alpha on the other hand is not at all oriented towards finding Web pages, it’s for computing factual answers. It’s much more like a giant calculator for computing all sorts of answers to questions that involve or require numbers. Alpha is for calculating, not for finding. So it doesn’t compete with Google’s core business at all. In fact, it is much more comptetive with the Wikipedia than with Google.
On the other hand, while Alpha doesn’t compete with Google, Google may compete with Alpha. Google is increasingly trying to answer factual questions directly — for example unit conversions, questions about the time, the weather, the stock market, geography, etc. But in this area, Alpha has a powerful advantage: it’s built on top of Wolfram’s Mathematica engine, which represents decades of work and is perhaps the most powerful calculation engine ever built. From Twine
Go check it out at WolframAlpha.com
[Edit] Check it out here…
Try some various things like 88 mph, the meaning of life, AMAT, weather 78735, 6 ounces of broccoli
Related posts:
- Google Toolbar: Useful and free I just thought I’d plug the Google Toolbar again. If...
- This page got an out This page got an out loud wow from me today....
- Celebrate banned book week: read a banned book Official Google Blog: Celebrate your freedom to read Google has...
