A new search engine, known as Wolfram|Alpha has launched. It may be improper to refer to it as a search engine, as it refers to itself as a "computational knowledge engine".The engine differs from a traditional search engine in that the goal of the engine is not only to make information accessible, but in the case of WolframAlpha, immediately computable.
To perhaps give a better explanation of what WolframAlpha is, let us walk through an average searching scenario. I stumble on the website, and in the search field I decide to type my city's name, Toronto.
If the website stumbled upon were Google, one would now have access to several pages referring to Toronto. If the engine stumbled upon was WolframAlpha, one would have immediate access to the populations (both overall and that of the metro core), local time, location in coordinates, satellite imagery, etc.
Now let's assume that one wanted to search for a specific date, such as a birthday. On Google, type the date and see a list of related pages and perhaps even some news articles, if the date is significant. On WolframAlpha, type the date and be presented with the date displayed in different formats, a time difference of the present moment to the entered date, a breakdown of which day and week the date landed upon within the year that was searched, any worldwide observances that fall on that day, notable events in history, sunrise and sunset information, and even information on the phase of the moon on that date.
The engine also does number crunching! WolframAlpha boasts the ability to compute ANY numerical problem.
Surely, this engine with all of its power still cannot compute the meaning of life, right? Wrong. It can, and lo and behold, the answer is still 42.
As I said below, it can't tell how to make a hamburger or pizza, but it can tell the total nutrition value for a large glass of Coke + a McDonald's hamburger:
http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+l...d%27s+hamburger
If one understands why that is, then one understand the goal with WA. :-p
Having said that, sure, WA is far from perfect, and is missing out on being able to do things one would expect it to.
1. It's not a search engine, it's a knowledge base. So it can't know how to make pizza, because that isn't research, and biased knowledge.
2. The current version is mostly focused for science.
3. It doesn't try to compete with Google.
As a service to compete with Google Calculator, I find it very impressive. Just compare currency conversions like "120 USD in CAD", conversions between numeric systems. It can of course do other fun things, like tell the weather when you were born ("weather in [city] on [date]"
There is a hand-made list of questions it can answer and math problems it can solve. It can't do anything else.
http://www37.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wha...uropean+swallow
http://www37.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wha...uropean+swallow
Haha - very good! But I want it for an African swallow
It tries to let you ask things in plain English but that model has already been rejected by users in too many other online engines to count, including large ones like Ask Jeeves did it.
It's also slow as hell. The pages load fast but the answers take forever. Not only is your net loss in time the same, but the whole concept of information not loading as soon as the page does is dumb. Information is what I go to the page for. Not the ****ing Wolfram|Alpha logo.
This website basically devalues AJAX and preloader animations entirely, using them even where there is absolutely no call for it. It shows you an animation when you submit a query, pretending that it is fetching the information. Then it takes you to a page and shows you more animations, when it actually does fetch information. And there are multiple animations with no indication of what you are waiting for.
1). Why does a website make you so angry?
2). I don't recall Google giving me a rundown of actual information except simple calculations and exchange rates, just links to where you can get the info. Do you get http://www37.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+smallest+country from Google?
What do you expect it to tell you about "green tea", though? I mean, giving you the data about the film of the same name isn't exactly wrong.
Awesome
Who knew we had one inside of us!
Again, awesome.
Lies. I typed in "p = np?" and nothing came back.
http://www37.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+n*p%3Dp
NP-complexity ftw.
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