IT Curmudgeon

Wolframalpha is the intriguing new search engine from the inventor of Mathematica, which is the standard for advanced mathematics software.

Who needs a new search engine, when Microsoft, Google and Yahoo scramble to list all the websites you ever want to visit? There may be different reasons to use search engines:

1. to find a website
2. to get an article with detailed information on a topic
3. to get some quick information on a topic

The first kind of search yields a list of websites, some of which you may not want to visit at all. Searches can result in a mix of real content and fake pages that are created by people to generate traffic and ad revenue. The fake pages are useless and waste everyone's time.

Even if these fake pages were removed, a list of millions of web pages which have a word or phrase appearing on them is useful when you wish to find a news article, instructions from a user manual, etc. For those of you who have time on your hands, page through the google pages. At one time, you could not go past about the 78th page of website listings or so. I haven't checked recently (I wrote a computer program to do it).

The second kind of search is what you need when you are researching or creating material for a presentation. This is where Wikipedia comes in. Wikipedia is fantastic for finding information on things like women aviators in history and other topics where detailed information is needed to deepen one's knowledge.

Wolframalpha fills a niche that helps when you need a quick explanation of a word or concept. It also does mathematical calculations and quite a few other functions.

If we search Google, it reports that it knows about 3,980,000 websites which have the word "phenomenology" on them. If you click on the selection for "definition" it takes you to an entry on Answers.com which gives a definition and quotes a number of dictionary sources and encyclopedias with their entries for the word.

The Wikipedia entry first gives what they call a "disambiguation" page, that helps identify different ways the term might be used so users can be directed to the appropriate choice. Each of the entries, in the case of the word "phenomenology", are quite extensive and complete. This works very well for individuals with particular needs.

Entering the word into Wolframalpha gives a clean, concise answer that may be just right for what someone may need in a number of situations.

Will Wolframalpha change our brains? Maybe not. It does fill a niche that may help people be more productive, which is a good thing. It is refreshing at a time when a lot of web marketplace entries are playing "me too" and "catchup" that a company has taken a different track, offered a new paradigm, and offered something that will help people in a unique way.