Wired UK led me to take a look at Wolfram|Alpha, a new ‘computational knowledge engine’ launched this month. In a nutshell, it’s a a little like Google for databases. Instead of searching the entire web and trying to decipher the human-readable content out there, it draws on a vast array of machine-formatted data to compile an ‘on-the-fly dossier’ on the topic you want. The output is snazzy in its presentation, including everything from tables and graphs to chemical structures and musical staves. However, while these cracking examples demonstrate its power and potential to supplement traditional search when doing research, it’s currently let down by an overly heavy skew towards the scientific and mathematical – try to compare musicians or find out about a famous poet, for example, and the output is limited at the very best. Despite this, it’s an interesting concept and definitely worth a look, especially if you find yourself regularly Googling areas such as maths, science or finance.

Posted Monday, May 18th, 2009 @ 7:51 am
Filed in business and productivity, science and tech

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