Making Real Use of WolframAlpha

Search engines are hot. No surprise there. Google? Search engines also = advertising revenue and revenue is always hot.

The tech world of buzz is constantly on the watch for “killer” apps. Not killer in that they actually do executions, but ones that will “kill” the previous market leader. That’s like Google did to Yahoo way back when.

In this David and Goliath atmosphere there’s always a watch for the Google-killer. We were promised that last summer in the form of Cuil, another search engine that turned out to be rather banal, just maybe better formatted.

Admittedly there’s nothing very exciting about the look of Google search results. They look like the same list of links, search engines have always shown us. Google’s success, of course, has been in its “Page Rank” algorithm that has a fairly good chance of finding what you’re looking for and putting it at the top of the reults page.

This year’s Google-killer turned out to be very different from it’s supposed victim.

WolframAlpha is an answer-engine (see, not search) that has the rather amazing ability to answers factual queries by computing the answer from data that it already knows. Now that is very cool — examples that are suggested on their website include: London to Sydney (will calculate the distance, I don’t know about you but I’m always interested in distances between cities — Austin, TX to Mountain View , CA? — 1477 miles — takes almost 3 days to drive in a U-Haul truck, but I digress), $250 + 14% (will calculate the answer — useful for computing sales tax) and caffeine (chemical analys of the drug, interesting but no intersection with my daily life).

Unlike traditional search engines, WolframAlpha is pretty useless if you’re into the vanity of say Wolfram-ing yourself, it said “Dan Perlman” — Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with that input. Google found me, my ego is salved.

I wanted to find what I thought would be a real world application for WolframAlpha, here it is, my query: