WolframAlpha is the much-anticipated, not-a-search-engine-and-not-aiming-to-beat-Google information tool that launched last weekend.

So why all the hoopla? Because WolframAlpha has set itself a rather audacious goal: to ‘bring expert knowledge to everyone’.

Rather than search the web and return links to webpages, WolframAlpha is a ‘computational knowledge engine’ that generates answers by performing computations on its own internal knowledge base.

That should give you a hint, right there, that typing in random search phrases into WolframAlpha is unlikely to generate anything of much value. Indeed, using WolframAlpha will be exceptionally frustrating for you if you approach it in the same way you’d approach Google.

But ask it a certain kind of question… and the results might astound you.

And that’s why WolframAlpha is such a big deal. Over time it may give an increasing number of people a new kind of search experience, and one that, while not replacing Google, Yahoo, or MSN, might divert people away from using those tools so much. Simply because they’ll get better answers from WolframAlpha.

Actually, it might divert people away from all kinds of other sites too. Want to know what time it is in Los Angeles and New York City right now? Type those cities into the WolframAlpha search box and you’ll get the time quicker than you can visit one of the various time tracking websites.

In any case, when you visit WolframAlpha you’ll find plenty of information about, and examples for, what kind of searches to perform.

And while, at first, the tool might appear a bit abstract and unrelated to Internet marketing… you might discover WolframAlpha to be extremely useful as a kind of ’super-calculator.’ Quite handy when you’re trying to calculate something, wanting to compare something, or looking for some facts and figures.

I encourage you to play around with WolframAlpha to see what it can do. For example, I typed in “Los Angeles, New York City” and got a quick snapshot of the differences between the two cities in terms of population, current local time, approximate elevations and the distance between each other.

I did another search on “microsoft, apple” and got some comparative data about the two companies.

What interesting information will WolframAlpha dig up for you?

Give WolframAlpha a whirl here: WolframAlpha

For examples on how to use WolframAlpha go here: examples of how to use WolframAlpha

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Technology. 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.