Wolfram Alpha: Wow!
Monday, May 18, 2009 at 12:03AM 
We might be on the cusp of a renaissance in search. After years of Google as the dominant engine, (which follows years of Yahoo in the same position,) Wolfram Alpha could be a game changer. If you haven't done so yet, head to their website and give it a whirl. Yes, searching as you do now might not return results all that spectacular, but take a few moments to go through the suggested searches and the potential power of Wolfram Alpha is revealed.
For example, want to know if you're under/over paid for your industry? Just enter your job title followed by 'salary' and the median and mean salaries for your job will be returned. The biggest initial use of Wolfram will be for research. It takes a few tries to get used to the syntax to get what you want, but once you realize you can find the weather for NYC on Oct. 2 1982 with one click of the search button, it's quite an amazing feeling.
This search engine could fundamentally change the way students write papers. Research time(for better or worse) can be dramatically reduced. One lingering question though will be how Wolfram deals with conflicting data: If two different groups believe two different heights are accurate for a building, for example, if Wolfram chooses one, it might become the default "truth." Or the search engine could devolve into asterisks and caveats to account for conflicting facts.
For now though, it's fast, concise, and super-impressive.
Reader Comments (2)
Wolfram Alpha is not there yet.
I tried it this morning with two questions: What is the history of US defense spending? What is the black budget? The results were dismal.
I tried the same in Google, and got meaningful results.
I entered "body mass index", and filled in my height and weight. The results were meaningful and dismal at the same time. But it worked well.
I didn't find it to be fast, though, as I tried different searches. We'll have to see how useful it really is.