Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Wolfram|Alpha

A new search engine has recently gone online, though Wolfram|Alpha seems more a competitor to Wikipedia than to Google. The idea is to serve as a data search and computational engine.
Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim 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. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
It can solve equations for you, tell you notable events for a given date, or give you the current sky position of Pioneer 11. Try typing in your favourite gene, or even your first name. It's a cool little resource. I had fun playing around with inputs to see what it could do.


5 comments:

Rob said...

OMG.
That thing is USELESS.
half the time it doesn't understand the input. even if I am only changing an example slightly.
hype or what?
is it just me?

Kamel said...

It definitely has limited usefulness, but I didn't have many issues with understanding input.

Anonymous said...

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
And it tells me that '42' is the meaning of life... so geeky.

Dominic said...

Stephen Wolfram is apparently a bright mind....is ego is as big as the Everest but every time I look at something he produces (besides Mathematica which I heard is fantastic) I feel like: "WHAT???"

I tried an entry: Cuboid Syndrome (Being a runner I am afflicted by this once in a while)....the answer was: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

It seems to me that Wolfram is a linear thinking guy that produces linear thinking tools. Not cool in a world where Google is Goliath....Stephen WOlfram is definitely not David!

Cheers!

Basty said...

Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine so it's not much of a use if you are searching for terms that won't involve calculations. It's great for mathematicians, statisticians, and those that deal with numbers most of the time, but not for the average searches. I, myself, would still need search engines like Find.com, Google, etc. for most of my searches.