Wolfram|Alpha The World’s Most Powerful Knowledge Engine

Wednesday, June 10th 2009 by Joe CorbettcloseAuthor: Joe Corbett Name: Joseph Corbett
Email: joe@istrategylabs.com
Site: http://www.istrategylabs.com/
About: Joe is the COO of iStrategyLabs, and his focus is on creating perfect digital/physical execution for clients and the lab itself. Being charged with keeping the lab operating efficiently 24/7 demands that Joe knows how to solve problems in 100 different ways, but he prides himself on finding the elegant solution that most satisfies each job. He has been deeply immersed in the web since the age of 10, and started his first tech business at age 16. Joe’s true passion is studying human behavior and technology’s influence on it. You can tweet him @joecorbettSee Authors Posts (53)

Do you remember the first time you used a search engine to conduct research? Do you remember the name of that search engine? I grew up using search engines so I don’t remember the first one I used; however, I do remember times in my life when I’ve sat in front of my computer, pulled up a search engine, and it feeling as though I was tunneling through the collective knowledge of past and present civilizations. Those are very empowering feelings.

I haven’t had that feeling in a long time; like many of you, I have come to expect major leaps in technology and information gathering, so it takes a tremendous amount of change to impress me. Enter: Wolfram|Alpha. This is not your typical search engine; in fact, it is being called an “answer engine.” Wolfram|Alpha separates itself from the likes of Google, Yahoo, and all the rest by delivering answers, instead of results. The databases that Wolfram|Alpha uses are scrubbed of erroneous data and is essentially an aggregate of many of the world’s best libraries.

Typical search engines take your queries and attempt to match them to the best answers, which are based on the most popular results using keywords, track-backs, and a variety of other metrics. Wolfram|Alpha will take search results and compute the data into useful factual information. In the past few years, companies have stepped up to the plate with the intention of unseating Google as the most powerful search engine, but all have failed. Wolfram|Alpha might be that “answer engine” to de-throne Google. Not because it is better, but because it is different. Wolfram|Alpha seeks to serve a new market, based on facts and pure data, which frees us from sifting through the never-ending piles of useless data living on the internet today.

Many argue that Google already does a great job of sifting through this junk data, and I agree; but I have never personally typed a search term into Google and then hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with the expectation that Google will come up with something worth referencing in a post or article, for example. Wolfram|Alpha has the potential to be that tool which allows us to take the result of queries and reference them as facts. Educational technology is poised to take a giant leap forward when Wolfram|Alpha becomes more popular and their databases prove themselves to be the massive digital almanacs they claim to be.

Watch the screen-cast to get familiar with how to best put Wolfram|Alpha’s search algorithms to work and then run some of your own searches. If you are not impressed, then I challenge you to show me a tool that works half as well as Wolfram|Alpha, while remaining absolutely free of cost.

Here is a comparison of Wolfram|Alpha and Google searching for “mass of the moon vs mass of the earth.” Which engine do you think yields more valuable results from the persepective of usable data?

Creating Wolfram|Alpha Part I

Creating Wolfram|Alpha Part II

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