Posted on 05/18/2009 11:10:16 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The online 'computational knowledge engine' calculates answers, unlike Google, which searches for information that already exists.
How long does it take to get to Saturn at, say, the speed of light?
With Wolfram Alpha, the online "computational knowledge engine" that launched Monday, the answer -- 75 minutes -- can be found in a fraction of a second.
Web users can submit customized questions to the service, and Wolfram Alpha will try to work out the answer on the fly. The chance that a healthy 35-year-old woman will contract heart disease in the next 10 years? One in 167. The temperature in Washington, D.C., during the July 1976 bicentennial? An average of 74 degrees.
For questions like these, Google and Wikipedia, perhaps the two best known online reference tools, would search through vast databases of existing Web pages hoping for a match.
Not so with Wolfram Alpha. "We're not using the things people have written down on the Web," said Stephen Wolfram, the project's creator and the founder of Wolfram Research Inc., which is based in Champaign, Ill. "We're trying to use the actual corpus of human knowledge to compute specific answers."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
great. one more step and the dumbing down will be complete.
You mean those weird pictures that come up aren’t you?
Amusing.
And if I ask what is the speed of a 747, it gives up (although, it does know who makes the airplane and how many have been built).
If I ask it about BOS DFW, it coughs up a few semi-interesting interesting facts. However, if I present the same query to Google, I get actionable information.
The mission is to organize the world's information. Some players are ahead of others. The more the merrier!
There were those who said, "Huh?". And there were those who said, "They can't spell! What's wrong with our schools! ... Um, maybe their lawyers advised them to misspell the word so it would make a stronger trademark!!"
And there were those, such as cynwoody, who typed in queries more simply than usual (remember altavista?) and got answers more quickly than usual and never looked back.
bookmark
Sux.
Ha, I thought it was an outstanding reference.
Not impressed so far...it looks to be a glorified version of the Google calculate function...the press/Drudge was touting it as a “Google-Killer” and it isn’t even a search engine!! Wolfram refers you out to Google, Yahoo or Live for Web results. I can’t even get “Where is the Space Shuttle” to work right!
Likewise, I am not impressed.
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