Wolfram Alpha – A Highly Impressive Scientific Computation Engine

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Finally, after a long wait, the much hyped “Wolfram Alpha” went live a few days back.

And I must say, I am very impressed with the data and the visualizations this search engine churns out.

Though many people say that it is a Google Killer, I somehow would want to differ on that. This is not like Google which gives you only contextual best results but it is bit more on the advanced side and give you some amazing results for almost any query you throw at it, in a visual format.

For Example,

If you give a date, say June 23, 1988, it churns out the day, the time difference from today (in years, weeks, months, days respectively), its day number in 1988, any notable event that happened that day and even the daylight information, and the phase of the moon.

If you give a city name, say Bangalore, it gives you the city population, location, Current local time, Current Weather there and the approximate elevation from the sea.

If you give any calculation like 12.9567% of 765, it give you back the exact result as 99.119

If you give it any website name, like Techieblues.com, then it gives you the host name, location, daily page views, daily visitors, Webpage information, HTML element hierarchy of the domain.

Now here come the most killer part, just give any complex trigonometric expression, like x^2 sin(x)/(Cos(x) Tan(x^2))”>x^2 sin(x)/(Cos(x) Tan(x^2)), and see the answer in a jiffy. It not only gives you the result but also its graphs, inequality plots, alternate forms, series expansion and also its derivatives. Can Google Do that?

Wolfram Alpha

At times though, due to the sudden rush of traffic and also the site is pretty much in Alpha state, it goes down once in while.

Though Wolfram Alpha might not be much useful for the normal internet user, this is a definite treasure for all the researchers, bloggers, students etc.

Do check it out. Also you can download its search toolbar/ Firefox Addon/XP Deskband/Vista Gadget/iGoogle gadget from here.

What did you think about the search engine? Do Pass on your Comments.