Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha (WA) was launched on  18th May. The reaction has been rather harsh in general because of the way it is touted as a Google killer but this really is to misunderstand what it is. It is not a search engine as such it is a more repository for facts with an advanced calculator or a Turing machine. It will have a stab at finding information but it is not a thinking machine that knows everything.

I think that that many people were expecting an omniscient computer like Douglas Adams’ Deep Thought.  WA it is somewhat less powerful. It hasn’t got to rice pudding yet either.  However where it does excel is in response to mathematics and physics, economics, data facts. Given that most data on the web is based on US it is better at finding these facts than anything else. where it presents a wide range of data in a variety of ways.

Google are also working on a similar project called Google Squared.  I would use it for mathematical queries where the data is  likely to be correct and impossible CAPTCHAs.

However, one thing which WA gets right is this old chestnut

399999999999999-399999999999998 = 1 in WA.

In Google it is 0 due to it lack of arbitary precision arithmetic.