Friday, April 27, 2012

Wolfram Alpha: The Computational Search Engine

We all have known used, praised and may be sometimes also cursed Google search engine. but, Google is all about keywords, metadata, page ranks...etc. Now,the importance of a bunch of search results is only known to the user who keyed in a search phrase. And , its all fine with textual data while numerical data is complete;y different. If one would have to search through a huge bunch of number with their own relevance and importance, he better better have some sense or patience. So, to make things easier for all the geeks obsessed with numerical data, people at Mathworld came up with an online tools to perform computation based searches.The application is available online via the website www.wolframalpha.com


In the end it all boils down to how useful the application can be. If you ask it to compute  the GDP of say India it does pretty good job of pulling in all the data from various authentic sources.It also plots a graph for us and can also do many more stuff. So, do explore and exploit this tool to the full. And, did I tell you that you can also ask it solve problems for you. Now, ain't that neat. There are a whole bunch of example searches that teach you how best to use this computational search engine.









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