Every few months we hear of a new search engine rising up to challenge Google. In the past few weeks I have heard of three: Bing, WolframAlpha and SearchMe – three very different tools.
Matthew in our company is going to look at Bing in a later post so I’ll skip that one.
WolframAlpha is not actually a search engine per se. Steven Levy of Fortune writes that Wolfram is an “engine for answers”. WolframAlpha was developed by Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame – sophisticated computational software. In other words, WolframAlpha is great for information related to numbers.
Let’s try some examples. In the search window type “mars” and click on the compute button. What you don’t get is a list of web pages. Instead WolframAlpha gives you information about Mars listed as Results. You will discover that Mars is 11.69 light minutes from earth. Unfortunately, I can’t remember from Physics what a “light minute” is, so I looked that up. One light minute is the distance light travels in one minute – 11.18 million miles. So Mars is a long way from earth – 179.7 million miles in fact.
Now for something different. Type in “ACTCGTC” and compute (another example suggested by Steven Levy). To the untrained eye this looks like gibberish or code. In fact this symbolized gentitc code. Results will give you details on human genome information.
If you type in the date of your birth, WolframAlpha will return some interesting details about that specific day. I was born on a Saturday.
You can also use WolframAlpha to look up financial stats on public companies. Compute results for Google. How many companies can claim $1.24 million per employee? Yahoo is just over $500,000. Microsoft is $700, 000. Exxon is nearly $6 million – Wow.
Kewl stuff but let’s switch gears to SearchMe. This is a search engine in a traditional sense but the results are graphical. Instead of text like Google, the whole web page of a site is displayed in a similar way to iTunes. Interesting but I prefer reading text results because it is faster for me to scan a page then clicking to a website.
Jeff
The three serch engines are definitely a something to look up to with Wolfram Alpha hitting the headlines often. A similar search engine that I fould coming up fast is the aafter search. This private search has some of the best means of accessing data and its cashback features for online purchase is something not to be missed.
Richard
Thanks Richard. I had a look at http://www.aafter.com. I don’t see an obvious benefit over Google but it is interesting.
[...] week I wrote a post on a couple new search engines. One of the search engines mentioned was Bing – Microsoft’s new “decision” [...]
Here is a link to a talk on Ted by Stephen Wolfram:
http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_of_everything.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-04-27