Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Wolfram Alpha – The best computational search engine ever

Posted: 14 May 2009 03:19 AM PDT

When Google released their search tool to the world way back in the days, everyone knew it was going to be a game changer. Why? Because it was simply awesome compared to everything else out there.

Today I am pleased to say that there is another tool releasing soon that will be just as big of a game changer. It's not a competitor to Google, but it does something Google cannot do right now.

What is that? Computational analysis of data to give you a direct answer. What do I mean by that? Well, what if you typed Springfield into Google, what do you get? Well you get a list of companies and websites related to Springfield the city.

Useful info, but maybe you don't want to go to the official site of Springfield, but instead want to know more about the city itself. Well right now, you can't do that in Google. You have go to the third party site like City-Data.com and get stats and other types of mathematical data like population and historical weather patterns.

WolframAlpha hopes to change all of that with it's soon to be released computational search engine.

So what exactly is Wolfram Alpha useful for? Well, it's meant to answer questions that require any kind of computation. For example, you can type "GDP of France" and get the following results:

You get graphs, charts, and all kinds of other information related to your query. Of course, it's all stats and mathematically related stuff, but it's pretty cool. So what other kind of info can you get? All kinds of crazy stuff. For example, search "Internet users in Europe" and you get this:

Or what if you just got your cholesterol taken and you want to learn more about the numbers. Type in LDL 150 and get this:

If you are in science or an engineer, you can get information on airflow, thermodynamics, chemical compounds and lots more. But what about us average folk? Ever wanted to know what's in 2 cups of orange juice? Type in that Wolfram Alpha and get this:

Pretty amazing! You can also do all kinds of financial calculations that you would otherwise have to do in Excel, such as calculate the monthly payment on a 30 year mortgage with 5% interest.

Awesome! I have to say this is super exciting. If you want to see the whole demo, check it out at the Wolfram Alpha blog. And that is only a small subset of what this search engine can really do! They plan to add tons more data over time. Enjoy!