Wolfram Alpha is something I have wanted to blog about for some time but felt like it may be old news. However upon using it this weekend and sharing it with some choice friends over StumbleUpon whom I thought may like it, I got a mixed response of awesome, what is this? and “I searched for Tits”. Now while you often get a good spread of feedback, none of these people had seen or heard of this systematic search engine and I felt it my duty to spread the word.
The brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha as the search engine has been appropriately titled is quite different to any search you have done before. It is built on Mathamatica a language designed by Stephen himself and developed indirectly to make this approach possible.
When you search for something on Wolfram Alpha the results will not be a list of external search engines where the keywords you searched for appear but attempt to suck information available on the internet regarding the keywords you searched for and present them to you in an intuitive database driven interface.
Currently Wolfram Alpha contains more than ten trillion pieces of data, five hundred thousand types of algorithms/criteria, and different capabilities and has been the development of more than 20 years research at the Stephen Wolfram founded Wolfram Research Centre.
For example, if I search my birthday it wont show me a list of popular sites that happen to contain the date I just typed into the search but will work out that A) its a date and B) to display statistical information regarding the particular date into a visual interface. See the screenshot below to see the results.
If you were to type in 2500 Euros it would know it is a currency and give you statistical research based on the amount and the currency. Very clever indeed if you ask me, see the screenshot below for the results.
You can see many more examples by both topic and image gallery. To see some more examples visit here and or visual search or if you want to get searching now you can use the conveniently embedded search below.
