I tried to stay awake on Friday evening until the early hours of Saturday morning to see Wolfram being launched to the World. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it and blissfully feel asleep before the 1am launch time (God I’m getting so old…).
Sadly, the first thing I did on Saturday morning was check out this new search engine. Wolfram founders claim it will be “as important as Google” in the future I so far fail to see how. Maybe it will be more important than WikiPedia or possibly Google will buy some of its algorithm and make it seamlessly fit in with their already great search engine.
So what is Wolfram and how will it benefit you?
Apart from the few fun things you can search for in Wolfram like “Why did the chicken cross the road” (Wolfram’s Answer) or “What is the meaning of life?” (Wolfram Answer) you can actually get some quite amazing information from it.
Not only does it hold statistics that you probably would never have cared about before in your entire life, it also interprets the question you pose to it. So instead of “hacking” google to find something as trivial as “tides in New York on October 5th 2005″, simply enter it into Wolfram and he’ll have an answer for you (click here to see!)
You can check how popular your name is, information about the day you were born and even solve complicated mathematics all in one place. Wolfram is definitely a powerful piece of software with a lot of data. How you will benefit depends on how you work I guess. Unlike WikiPedia it’s all about the facts, there is no extra waffle or some persons interpretation of a situation – it just gives answers the way you would expect from a computer.
It will be interesting to see where they bring this when it’s out of Alpha – it’s definitely setting itself up to be something extremely interesting. Only time will tell how useful it will actually be to us!
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