Just this month, Stephen Wolfram, the founder of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science, has officially released a new website, Wolfram Alpha. As the media has recently been publicizing Wolfram Alpha as the new “Google killer”, I decided to test out the capabilities of this new Internet phenomenon.
After a quick visit to this new website at http://www.wolframalpha.com, it is obvious that Wolfram Alpha is not in competition with Google or any other search engine. While Google is labeled a search engine, Wolfram is a computation engine. If you feed it a question, it will compute the answer. Wolfram Alpha interprets the question and returns with various graphs and holding data it has computed based on its built in models that represent “real-world knowledge”.
The site covers large scientific and mathematical domains making it easy to use Wolfram Alpha to solve mathematical problems, such as the input “lim (2x^e)/x^3 as x->0”, or to find the molecular structure of propane.
In comparison to a collective encyclopedia like Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha does not contain specific details on a certain topic and often returns vague information. On the other hand, because of its ability to calculate results, Wolfram has the potential to be able to cover areas that Wikipedia cannot as Wiki will never be able to index the answers to everything. Wolfram effectively serves as a stock lookup, weather forecaster, dictionary, atlas, thesaurus, and more. Although I was surprised at the flexibility of the site, it currently does not cover many topics that programmers would be interested in; any results for JAVA, PHP, CSS, or HTML are either unrelated or non-existent.
I felt that Stephen Wolfram’s new project was quite impressive. To be able to have a computer handle human language and translate it into a collective page of data is rather remarkable, especially from a programmer’s viewpoint. Even so, the use of this site is limited. Other than helping students with calculus and science work or finding factual information on stocks or countries, Wolfram Alpha still does not have very much practical use. For now, the general public will likely refer to Google or use Wikipedia to find more specific details that Wolfram’s broad summary will not cover.
Just for a bit of amusement, you can try out these easter eggs posted on Mashable: Top Ten Easter Eggs and Top Ten Better Easter Eggs
For one of the easter eggs, Wolfram Alpha responds to the question “What do you not like?” with:
I also discovered another easter egg not that was not mentioned on the two above websites:
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