Monday, December 21, 2009

Wolfram Alpha is amazing!

In all the commotion surrounding Microsoft's Bing, the demise of Yahoo Search, and Google's counter-attack by announcing a light-weight OS, something really useful to me, did not get as much play as it should have.

Wolfram Alpha is an amazingly intelligent search engine/parser/magic genie, for anything mathematical in particular. I have using it quite regularly, not quite as a substitute for Google yet, but even something as unthinkable as that could happen.

In the academic realm, it is a killer resource.

Here are just a few illustrative screenshots from my search today. You may have to zoom in a little bit for clarity.





2 comments:

Mukul said...

How do one know about the authenticity of these search results?

Sachin Shanbhag said...

from what i understand this search engine does not aggregate results from the web (like google), but uses in-house databases. i would presume its accuracy to be greater than or equal to a google search. of course you could question the results that mathematica throws up...