Posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 by Shachar Pessis
Wolfram|Alpha – There’s no doubt about it, we’re living in the age of fast and always-accessible information at our fingertips. Consequently, many relevant players – aside of Google – are constantly hard at work in manipulating, simplifying and renovating the overall issue of online search. Wolfram|Alpha, inspired by scientist Stephen Wolfram’s vision, is an emerging player in the web’s search field. Their long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. Their aim is to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.
Will this be the next generation of search engines? I doubt anyone at this time could exceed Google’s accuracy and efficiency in terms of search results. However, in certain cases, Wolfarm turned out to be the top dog, leaving the mighty Google in the dust. To give an example, I tried searching what is 101110101110001010 (a random binary sequence I chose)? Wolfram|Alpha’s results had the capabilities of handling this odd question while Google didn’t pull through. Another nice Wolfram|Alpha feature is a search by relevant specific information; see what happens when you type in your date of birth… Give it a try, I suggest starting with some search examples to see what search method tickles your nerve ends.
