Tech Knowledge: Wolfram|Alpha, Give Me the Data

Logan Rosen ‘12
Webmaster & Tech Editor

Google is Google.  You put in a query, and voila!, there are your results.  Nothing special, but for some reason, the more than three billion people who visit it each day treat it like it’s the best search engine in the world.

Competitors such as Yahoo! Search, Lycos, and Ask have been trying for years to beat Google, but they have found it to be a lost cause.  Those competing search engines only have attracted a small percentage of people.

When Stephen Wolfram sat down one day and developed a plan for Mathematica, a computational software program, it is highly unlikely that he wished to compete with Google.  And for 20 years, that has been true; although it may have served as a backend for websites performing mathematical computations, it didn’t have a full-fledged, user-friendly interface.

Enter Wolfram|Alpha, introduced to the public on May 15, 2009.  There is no real way to classify it.  Wikipedia calls it an “answer-engine,” and Wolfram calls its creation “a computational knowledge engine.”  This site is entering new territory.

Wolfram|Alpha can do mathematical calculations from computing the determinant of a matrix to factoring polynomials.  However, “mathematics” is only one out of the 29 and growing categories, which include socioeconomic data, astronomy, life sciences, chemistry, colors, and much more.

For example, in the topic of socioeconomic data, you can ask it “What is the population of Westport, CT?”, and it will say, “25,749 people (2004 estimate).”

That’s the beauty of Wolfram|Alpha: no sponsored results along the side, no cached results, and no frills.  This is nothing that you’re used to.

However, I caution you: this is not an all-purpose search engine.  Unlike Google and Bing, for example, it does not show you a traditional list of results.  It shows you the actual information, gathered from reliable sources including books and maps.

Don’t expect it to give results for the latest fashion trends or rumors about Chris Brown.  This site is statistics-based, and it does not have up-to-the minute information.

Nevertheless, this site is perfectly suitable for high school and college classes, and you can rest assured that the information is very accurate.  If your teacher gives you an extra credit assignment to find the average temperature on Saturn, the elevation of New York City, and the occurrences of the DNA base sequence AAGCTAGCTAGC in the human genome, well, you know where to go.

UPDATE: It now works on the iPhone!  Go to http://wolframalpha.com/iphone to try it out!

Try it out!

What do you think?  Will it beat Google?  Speak your voice below.