Posted on May 16, 2009 by by jr

“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.” - About Wolfram|Alpha

After a shaky start, given they had problems linking their super-computing clusters together and then the usual “its new on the net – everyone try it at the same time” loading issues, Wolfram|Alpha has gone live and is now accepting input from users.

It is an amazing tool and is an entirely new class of “search engine”, it would probably best described it as a “computational search and results engine” as it not designed to locate specific text or documents on the net in the manner that Google, Yahoo or MSN Live search does. More-so it appears very good at pulling out data or results without the “noise” associated with traditional searching techniques. I am not sure how large the underlying data sets are on which it bases its results, it is probably massive (and it appears to cite its sources in a search).

You can give Wolfram|Alpha a query such as:

• “demographics of Australia” and it will report back population, population density, population growth, life expectancy and median age,
• “distance from Perth to Canberra” and it reports back a result, unit conversions, direct travel times and a map,
• “Fibonacci series” and it reports back with a series expansion, a graph and a series representation,
• “Cat dog mouse” and it reports back the scientific name, taxonomy and a taxonomic network,
• “big mac” and it reports back average nutritional facts, average daily value ranking. average highest nutrients compared to other foods, calories, carbohydrates, fats and fatty acids, protein and amino acids, vitamins, minerals, sterols, and physical properties,
• enter equations and it will solve them for you, complete with graphs where appropriate,
• “flux capacitor” (as in the Film Back to the Future) and it gives the output as per the image below…

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