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:

and my answer:

What could be better than a nutritional computation engine for calculating how well I’m doing on my diet?

Try WolframAlpha and share with us your interesting results.

Other queries, I tried:

Brookline, Ma to Santa Cruz, CA – (How far I moved in 1996)

Phase of Mercury – (Might be what makes things weird)

Dan Perlman – (Wolfram said, huh?)

Conclusion?

WolframAlpha is very cool, can be very useful and will be worth every penny Google pays for it, when theyacquire it  in the next few years.

Google is in the process of digitizing and hosting the entire Life magazine photo and engravings archive, that’s about ten million photos.  Ten million images and they’re all  wonderful.

I love photography and am old enough to remember the real years of weekly Life magazine.  For me, this will not be a productivity booster since I expect to spend plenty of time digging through the images.

So far about 20% of the collection that dates back to the 1750s has been digitized, all will eventually be available.  The photographs are being incorporated into Google Image Search and can be isolated in your search by including source:life in your query.

See the Life magazine search page.

Read about the collection on the Google blog.

I spent time yesterday browsing through the images, the photographs of Picasso particularly fascinated me.  Give them a look.

The picture Google chose to feature in their blog post announcement is also one of my favorites, shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Alfred snapped this in 1963, at the climax of Guignol’s “Saint George and the Dragon” in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Just as the dragon is slain, some children cry out in a combination of horror and delight, while others are taken aback in shock. Every child is consumed with emotion, masterfully captured by Eisenstaedt’s camera. These amazing photos are now blended into our Image Search results along with other images from across the web.

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The site also allows you to compare other site combinations including Travel Sites, YellowPage sites or Job sites.

SearchBoth.com [Via WebWorkerDaily]