On May 18, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha was officially launched. Basically, it is a web tool that could be as important as any Search Engine or rather as important as Google (most popular of the breed). It is the brain child of British born physicist Stephen Wolfram and has been developed by Wolfram Research.

Wolfram|Alpha is an online service that computes and provides results to factual queries. In Google when we search for something, it provides us a list of web sites, documents and links while the same when computed at Wolfram|Alpha would provide a web page with statistical data. This should prove to be a boon to college students, researchers and the like. So out of Google, Wikipedia and Wolfram|Alpha, what do we use and when? Technically, while Google’s automated search algorithms crawl tens of millions of web sites to gather data, Wikipedia is a human-driven effort. Meanwhile, Wolfram|Alpha, uses a team of dedicated experts to add, evaluate, judge, and parse data.

I decided to give this new computational knowledge engine a try and choose “distance between Sun and Earth” as my query.

The results from Google were about 2,060,000 links and pages and the first link that it showed me was that to Wikipedia but not the actual figure.

Opening up Wikipedia provided me not only the figures but lot of interesting facts and data as well.

Feeding Wolfram|Alpha with the above query gave me the numbers in astronomical units – something which would not interest a common person. What I needed was either Kilometers or Miles.

The bottom line? Well, Wolfram|Alpha is surely promising as it offers a good amount of organized data along with charts and graphs. Moreover, Wolfram’s legacy application Mathematica has been put to use in Wolfram|Alpha and so this means that the site will shine in parsing mathematic queries. Maybe I’ve just scratched the surface of the knowledge engine here, but the fact is – how many Internet users would be interested in the statistical data.

Website: http://www.wolframalpha.com/