Wolfram Alpha

The much awaited (and a bit hyped) Wolfram Alpha made its debut last week. There was a lot of talk about it being a Google killer and like everybody else I too wanted to try it out. But I was in for a surprise. Firstly, Wolfram Alpha is NOT a search engine. It is being touted as a 'computational engine' which uses an internal knowledge base and outputs computations. Confused? I was too.

My first query was for 'iPhone' which did not return anything. Next, I tried Apple and I was presented with a lot of information about Apple's stock. Information included the latest stock price, revenue, price history, performance comparisons and a lot more. I was slowly getting a gist of what it does. Next I searched for '1 USD in INR' and got some interesting results.

I, then, tried other searches like 'Hyderabad', my birth date and anything else I could think of and there were some interesting and some not so interesting nuggets of information I gathered.

So, my take on the whole thing is that Wolfram Alpha is a data aggregator. Unlike Google, they don't use the internet as the data source and rely on their own internal knowledge base. Only time will tell how effective this tool is and whether or not regular netizens will adopt this tool. I, for one, need to find a reason to use this.

You can register for application APIs here and can find the FAQ here.