It does indeed look just like yet another search engine – but Wolfram Alpha is a completely different beast entirely – a computational knowledge engine.
But maybe it would be better to start with a few hard facts before we go raving about this snazzy new tool.
Why do we need a computational search engine?
Why not?
In its alpha release, Wolfram has just celebrated its first birthday with an Alexa traffic ranking that placed it in the top 5,000 sites globally. Still early days, but Wolfram Alpha will only go from strength to strength precisely because its unique novelty is also immensely useful.
How Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine works?
Basically, Wolfram works to calculate data for you – whether that involves mathematical algorithms (like a fancy calculator) or statistical information (like, literally, anything about the world that you can imagine).
Let me give an example; I wanted to know what the numerical result would be when the population of Tokyo was divided by the maximum recorded age for a dog; so I entered ‘pop. Tokyo/max age dog’ and, voila, I had a pretty useless but unique bit of info.
Ignoring this frivolous example however, one could easily see why Wolfram could be extremely useful for researchers, scientists, students, or even generally interested people. The concept is one which certainly has some serious potential and Wolfram is already arranging to charge for institutional services (it’s free for normal users like me and you).
Moreover, as Wolfram’s database of knowledge grows (upon which it depends to do its calculations) and we move towards a beta release, I expect we will be seeing and hearing a lot more about this gem of innovation; though not to belittle its success already – it was voted invention of the year for 2009 by Popular Science magazine.
In its alpha version the engine stood at 5 million lines of Mathematica code and runs on 10,000 CPUs, so the sheer scale of the project’s ambition is highly impressive already.
What’s next for a computational knowledge engine?
For people with smart-phones, Wolfram already makes a graphical calculator unnecessary (you can now do all the same stuff in your browser with Wolfram), while for the rest of us it represents a pretty useful tool for any kind of complex calculations and queries.
Experience Wolfram Alpha
So whether you fancy checking your life expectancy based on your age and demographic information for your location, or simply want to quickly check the maths of a mortgage plan over 25 years – or something else entirely, like statistics about World or Warcraft addiction, click over to Wolfram and see what it can do for you.
There’s a little bit of a learning curve while one gets used to how it works, but once you’re over that and start getting the best out of it you won’t look back.
