The need for a factual search engine arises from this thought. Wolfram Alpha is the brain child of Dr. Wolfram at Harvard University. Wolfram Alpha allows us to type our queries as questions and it will provide us with meaningful answers with relevant and useful data. The first thing I typed in to Wolfram Alpha is "Who is Mahatma Gandhi?” The answer I got is quite surprising and satisfying. It identifies that Mahatma Gandhi is an Activist and provide me with basic information about him like his full name, date of birth, place of birth, date of death, and place of death. It also provides me with a timeline of Gandhi's life. I type few other questions like "Who is Abraham Lincoln"? etc. But when I type "What is a firewall?" it provide me with the result of a movie named Firewall and its box office collection etc. So if you want to know the box office collection of a movie then this is the best way. Type in the name of the movie and you will get it.
The search engine or COMPUTATIONAL KNOWLEDGE ENGINE, which is the name with which the creator of Wolfram Alpha like to call it; provides lot of other features too. That is why it is called as a computational knowledge engine rather than a search engine. It basically, I think is not intended to provide you with search results, but to interpret your natural queries into a machine understandable form and provide you with the right answers. So it is more of an "answer to question computational engine" than a search engine. In other words, it is the marriage between knowledge and intelligence blended with search technology. So if something like Wolfram Alpha will become popular then knowledge will become more accessible and the internet will become more valuable.
Wolfram Alpha provides additional features like Comparison of stocks. One example given in the Wolfram Alpha website is that of the comparison between Apple's and IBM's stocks. The results you got are stunning and detailed. It will immediately provide you with the correlation coefficients, annual return, average daily return, and annual volatility like an expert with great precision. So you can use Wolfram Alpha to compare and analyze stocks too.
Another cool feature I noted in Wolfram Alpha is that when you enter the name of a town you get the details like the population, current time, weather forecast etc all in a single page and that is very useful. Then it can answer your mathematical queries. If you select the Mathematics section you can use Wolfram Alpha to provide you with solutions to the even the most difficult problems in mathematics. The date and time section provides you with detailed reports of a particular date, its features, most important happenings in history at that day etc. It also can provide you with information and answers related to lot of other categories like Statistics and Data, Physics, Chemistry, Materials, Engineering, Astronomy, Earth science, Life Science, Technological world, and lot more.
Wolfram Alpha is available as a add-on for Firefox3 and you can also download Wolfram Alpha plug-in for IE. IE8 users can download the Accelerator for Wolfram Alpha. It is also available as a widget for Widows Vista, and a gadget for iGoogle. Windows (XP/Vista) users can download a deskband version of Wolfram Alpha. You can even download Wolfram Alpha to your iPhone. To learn more about downloads you can click here.
The computational engine is I do not think related to the so called search engine war in any way because when search engines try to take you from websites to websites Wolfram Alpha tries to find solutions for your problems by analyzing, processing, and retrieving data from the internet and other database sources. So it will be more helpful to academics and researchers than ordinary surfers. But it is just a beginning and Wolfram Alpha is still in its early stages, so we did not know what is going to be the future of this great computational engine, but it will defenitely the way people search.
Dr. Wolfram, the founder of Wolfram Alpha has lot of plans for his new and amazing web tool. In the near future we may see Wolfram Alpha partnering with some big names on the internet. The future is, I think going to be bright for Wolfram Alpha which is considered one of the greatest inventions in computing by many experts. The only drawback that we may consider about Wolfram Alpha is that most people did not use natural language or questions regularly, they still like to use keywords because of the fact that they are quite accosted to it. But who knows, it may the invention that will change the way we search and use search engines forever.
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