Wolfram Alpha

For the past decade, Google has firmly dominated the seach engine market, with a current majority of about 66%. Yahoo is tripping over itself, Microsft has to assure users thats their search engine isnt an innacurate, feeble excuse of searching on the web, and the others are so miniscule that they arent even worth a mention in this post.

In May 2009, we got glimplse at what might be the most important tool on the interent, something that could trump Wikipedia and Google. WolframAlpha is a computational search engine, which means instead of giving you links for the information you want, it gives you results. There isn’t the problem where you might be searching for Google for hours to ifind what you’re looking for ,because Wolfram Alpha either has the information or it doesnt.

Its an advanced calculator, an accoutant, shows the population of any country in the world. You might think that it is less personal than Google because Google can find you, but you can input your height and weight and it will give you your BMI. It can organise a traning schedule for you, advise you on good eating habits.

It can be used by anyone because it knows what your saying. Lets say you want to find the capital of Andorra. You can either type in “capital andorra” or you can type “what is capital of andorra?” It finds the keywords in your query and gives you the same result.

Wolfram Alpha may be in the early stages of development (even though the engine used to make this, Mathematica,  was developed in 1993), there is still alot of information it doesnt have yet so it can only get smarter.