Tuesday 2 June 2009

Wolfarm Alpha - New way of searching!

Here is a new search engine "Wolfram Alpha". Unlike Google, this search engine make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. If Google returns the list of pages which will have information about the knowledge you are searching for, Wolfarm Alpha gives you the calculated results instead of referring to the pages. Let me explain with some examples which should clear the difference between Google (for that matter any search engine) and Wolfarm Alpha.

Let me try with a place name: Bangalore.

If I search in Google, it returns the list of pages which contains information or reference to Bangalore. If I search in Wolfarm Alpha, it gives me the stats about Bangalore like, Map, Coordinates, Country Name, Population, Current Local Time, Current Weather (I found it incorrect), and Approximate Elevation.

Let us enter any date (you can try with your birth date). Google returns the list of pages which has reference to that date. Wolfarm Alpha returns the data with respect to the date such as Time difference from today, Observations, Notable events that happened on that date, when sunrise and sunset happened, and the phase of the moon! I tried giving future date, the "Notable events" got changed to "Anniversaries". That's intelligence!

Let me show you how useful this engine will be. I would like to know when is the next solar eclipse. I just enter "next solar eclipse" and hit enter. Here you go! You'll get loads of information such as Eclipse time, countries in the path of eclipse, etc.

This ambitious project is driven by Stephen Wolfram. As of now, Wolfram Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. And as they say, this is just the beginning. More to come in the future and it will change the way we search for the information and get the desired data.

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