I’ve always loved reading reference materials, and probably always will. So if anyone out there had any doubt left in them that I’m not a total dweeb, banish those doubts now. But I’m unashamed in my love of absorbing facts, figures, diagrams and histories.
Growing up, those facts came almost exclusively from the set of encyclopaedias that my parents had filled a bookshelf with. These days, I’m guessing kids cruise round on Wikipedia or just Google whatever it is they’re interested in.
This week, to much fanfare, a new search engine was launched which adds another weapon to any fact-finder’s arsenal. It’s called Wolfram Alpha, and bills itself as a ‘computational search engine’. It’s built on a well-known scientific database called Mathematica, which was built by a genius by the name of Stephen Wolfram (hence the name of the search engine).
Wolfram Alpha is a little different from Google. It’s very powerful, but only within the constraints of the Mathematica database. Ask it a question about any science-related field, such as maths, engineering, geography or physics, and it will tell you everything it knows about your search query, in a nicely presented layout. It’s not too bad at some more ‘humanistic’ questions too, concerning music and sports.
The best way to get your head around it is, of course, to give it a go. Here’s some sample searches I tried:
Check out the examples section for some more great stuff.
Worlfram Alpha is like taking all those reference tomes I devoured as a kid and being able to cross-reference them in any way imaginable. It’s a great insight into how search engines will evolve to contain more ‘deep web’ information – all the juicy stuff stashed away in databases at the moment. And for a fact fiend like me, it’s also quite a bit of fun.
