Everyone knows Google. And now it’s hard to think how the web worked without search. I stumbled into something that, in a few years, might become just as essential to our experience of the internet. It’s called Wolfram|Alpha, and although it may look like a search engine, and may have been hyped as a google-killer, it isn’t like anything you may have used before.

The Wolfram people call it a Computational Knowledge Engine, and while Google will give you suggestions, Wolfram will give you answers. If you have a few minutes to kill you should check out their instructional video that gives you some idea of this things potential.

Start off with your birthday. Mine is July 22, 1977. Wolfram tells me that I was born on a Friday; that the sun rose at 6:32 am, and set at 8 pm that day. That it was a clear day with a high of 31°C and a low of 24°C in Nassau and that there was no rain, and the moon was a waxing crescent. Interesting, you say.

I write my thesis in a program called Scrivener that doesn’t divide my manuscript into pages, but simply gives me a word count. Now, how many pages is 33,000 words? Ask Wolfram. It’ll tell you that’s 132 pages, and if you dig a little deeper in the results it will even tell you that if I printed it out I’ll be killing 0.016th of a tree.

How about your credit card? What if you have $2000 credit card debt at 29.9% annual interest. How long will it take you to pay that off paying $50 a month? Ask Wolfram. It’ll not only show you how long it takes to pay the debt off but will also tell you how much money you are paying in interest, and compare that to other monthly payments.

This is of course, only scratching the surface. They say they are just getting started, and as time goes by Wolfram will do much more than it can now. If so, I’m along for the ride. It already has a permanent place on my tool bar.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Reviews, Subplots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.