Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Wolfram Alpha: A new kind of search engine

There's a new kid on the block worth checking out. "WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

Ok - let's try something simple. Type in today's date or the name of your town and state. Pretty interesting. There's a tiny link at the bottom of the page that lets you save your query as a PDF file. If you use Vista, you can download a gadget for your desktop.

Thanks to Anne for bringing this to my attention!!!

Check it out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wolframalpha19-2009may19,0,5810966.story

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html