Tired of your old search engine and looking for something different?  It may not be Wolfram Alpha...

Released earlier this week, www.wolframalpha.com takes firm aim at being a new kind of search engine - although perhaps not a 'google-killer'.

The product is the latest offering from Wolfram Research, the company founded and named after the math and computing genius, Stephen Wolfram - best known for the software 'Mathematica'. 

Wolfram Alpha isn't a search engine as such.  Self described as a 'computational knowledge engine', it doesn't respond to a user's search text by displaying a list of relevant web page.  Rather, Wolfram Alpha relies upon it's own database of facts and figures - quantitative data which is 'computable.'

So, how does it all work out?

Typing the words "Apple, IBM" into Wolfram Alpha is interpreted by the software as a request for information on the two companies - resulting in a comparison between both organisations - just the facts. The same text input to Google returns a page of web links - at the time of publication of this new article the top result was a page on Apple Inc.'s website regarding their partnership with IBM.

Wolfram Alpha aspires 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.'  So, Alpha sounds brilliant if you're working with stats, equations, formulas and other types of raw data - but if you need to order a pizza, or find an opinion on the latest film showing at your local cinema then Google looks still firmly rooted as being the search engine of choice.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Your website URL (optional)

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Are you human? Type the test text in the field below!

Add Comment