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New Search Engine - wolframalpha

First Review - wolframalpha Very good Website for analysis of data. Check out the examples page to review some query results

About the company - 

Goals

Wolfram|Alpha'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

Review about wolfarmalpha 

NYtime.com - The Veil Is Lifted From Wolfram Alpha

CNN.com - New search engines aspire to supplement Google

Telegraph.co.uk - Wolfram Alpha v Google: Which is better?

Youtube Demo -

 


Harvardbusiness blog - Wolfram Alpha vs. Google = Power vs. Simplicity?

Some have said his new project may rival Google because it goes well beyond simple searching of information to computation of useful knowledge. For example, if you ask it "What is the GDP of France divided by it population?" it will not only get the results, but you can look at the details underneath. (Try that on Google!) I also think it competes Wikipedia because it is a useful reference resource.

There is a wonderful tension between the universality of use and the usefulness of a tool. Contrary to popular belief, the most powerful tools we create as humans take effort to learn to. Mathematics, language, biology, all take years to become fluent in. Put another way, any literate person can use Google in their own language — it takes seconds to learn. But the process of becoming literate takes years to master. Google "rides on top of" our ability to read and write.

One of the great tragedies of the current computer revolution is the widespread expectation that every piece of software should be easy to use. Well, easy-to-use tools such as Google are useful to everyone, but because Google assumes that people will not make the effort to learn anything, they have to provide simple — even simplistic — interfaces. If the mass public expected that they might have to do a little learning and work, Google, Microsoft, and others could provide even more powerful tools for helping knowledge workers — but our education system and culture expect nothing of us as users. It is unfortunate.

Wolfram's tool, due to its deep logic and structure, will make demands on users — and in order to use it well, people will need to learn some new concepts and a query language. This means it will not have the widespread adoption of a Google-like tool. Still, I am optimistic. We all need search tools, and we should have other, more sophisticated tools that can help us participate in the creation of new knowledge, and new ways of looking at information. Attention is a vital measure, but not the only one that counts.

One way Wolfram might enhance our learning about his tool would be to mash up Wolfram Alpha with Twitter (which is Warhol/Avon-like), because one of the great challenges of using Wolfram Alpha is to format the right question to solicit an interesting answer. Twitter would be a great way to share and publish queries that had cool answers. Again, I think if he can tap into the Warhol/Avon effect, he'll have faster adoption, and we'll all learn more along the way.


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