Wolfram Alpha

Are you serious?

I came across this website Wolfram Alpha which was lauched officially today. It is a computational knowledge engine, claims the website. True. It can compute:
  • math (any equation worded in anyway easily interpretable - do you remember your algebra involving imaginary numbers?)
  • comparisons (between gdps of different countries, temperatures of different cities, usage of two words........ i mean the limit of comparison is sky-bound)
  • plain search (search for a name say, "andrew" and see what you get).
  • locations (like try to find where the International Space Station is)

The owner Stephan Wolfram claims this is just the beginning. Do listen to Stephan's introduction about Wolfram Alpha. It is not just a search engine. It is a computation engine. To me it not only searches and gives you results, but also gives you all the relevant search results in a good group of categories. Type a word and it will give you the meaning, usage statistics, etymology and a special "Synonym network".

Try "weather Stamford". Even though there are many cities named Stamford around the world, it knows where my computer is and gets the right city, state and country and its weather. Not just today's weather, but weather for the past 10 years. It puts the data in a nice chart and lets you analyze. Talk about providing "slap-on-the-face" information. You don't have to drool over how many search pages google returned and "Did you mean"?s that I should look for when I type Stamford.

Not satisfied, try a company name first and look at the amount of financial information you can get. Fine! what's the big deal. I can get that from wikinvest.com. No. No. Try entering another company's name alongside and see the depth of comparison.

I am familiar with Wolfram's Mathematica long time ago when I entered the finance/programming industry. At that time, it was pure math. I never expected they would come up with such a remarkable product.

Even though the computation is quick and exhaustive, at times, you feel that it is more confined to US and European countries and related. Try something very specific (like your grandma's name) and you will get, "WolframAlpha isnt sure what to do with your input" and it will give some suggestions. Whereas my beloved google will always give me something. Ofcourse it took what more than 10 years for google to get here, no?! Oh! Wait! Why should I be more generic when I can get the accurate information from WolframAlpha. So, try "When was google started" - September 15 1997, a waxing gibbous moon day. So it took 11 years 8 months and 3 days for google to get this mature.

Lets give this new toy some time and see how the world makes use of it!

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