A new search engine, or as they clarify a “computational knowledge engine”, Wolfram Alpha, was launched to the public on Saturday. You may have heard of this on the news recently, but now you can see it for yourself. Here is a link to a screencast providing more in-depth information. Take a few minutes to play around with it. A Lifehacker post explains in more detail some of the fun querries you can perform.
“How many football fields would fit between the Earth and the sun? What’s the likelihood of getting 2 heads in 10 coin flips? One search engine calculates all that on the fly and more.”
Here is an explanation in Wolfram Alpha’s own words of their new engine:
“Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing.”
It is able to interpret the question you are asking and return a data driven result as opposed to a list of links, pages, or resources.
Do you think this will be the future of search? I believe that there is still a need to be able to answer questions and find information that have many different “right” answers and are far more ambiguous. However, for fact based questions and answers I think this technology is remarkable.
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