Wolfram|Alpha is the latest kid on the search engine block. Its NOT Google. its NOT WikiPedia, but it is a new breed of search engines christened as ‘computational’. What that means is that Wolfram|Alpha will help students, researchers, writers, authors and people looking for very specific knowledge whether its mathematical formulas, scientific data, statistical data, analysis and ofcourse computational data. From the preview of Wolfram|Alpha it looks very promising. What it solves it where Google fails, that is targeted results or precise results to specific questions. For example if I want to search for ‘Fish Production in France’ , I am expecting statistical data but Google will return back 330000 site links where I would have to go through and analyse and model data. But with Wolfram|Alpha as per the below screen cast , the reuslts are in one page with the exact data I am looking for.

Now imagine a student looking to solve a complex mathematical equation..well you type the equation naturally in Wolfram| Alpha and it will give you the results with explaination in mathematical notations. The first cut of Wolfram|Alpha looks very promising. Although Wolfram|Alpha relies heavily on data collected which means, the data has to entered to sourced. If the channels of data source are not clear then you wont get the correct results. For example if I wouldl ike to search for data from US or Europe on gender or gdp or mortality the data would almost be very updated. But trying to query this data across African sub-continent or Asian demographics, the data wont be so accurate because the source may not be updated.

So the catch for users would be reliability of certain data based on the source of data. Ofcourse the presentation layer of the Wolfram|Alpha is briliiant in simplicity and usability. Is this a Google coup? Nope. Wolfram|Alpha is another breed of search engine which relies on computations, and Google is more fine tuned to normal human thought behavior when searching for data. I wonder what results Wolfram|Alpha will give for ‘Miserable Failure’. Last I checkd on Google, it was pointing to a real ‘Miserable Failure’ Wolfram|Alpha launches in later this month.

More information [Link]

Wolfram|Alpha Screencast [LINK]