Saturday, May 9, 2009

Wolfram|Alpha a brand new life to web search


I have always been a huge fan of Google.I belong to the group 'A day will come when i search my keys in Gooogle. With all the defects google had it was loved deeply from many.Our life literally depended on it. My newly married sister in-law is awarded as a good cook. Recently while speaking to her i found out about her much appreciated talent,well u can guess it,the complete credit goes to our good old Google.She being a software engineer working in samsung,googles out the recipes,gets d print out home n cooks like a pro.Google did have a few drawback,irritating at times when we wouldn't find what we were looking for in the first 10 or 20 webpages.But being a final year computer science engineering student we are aware that creating a better search engine is a tough job,close to impossible.We had taken up web search as our final year project with our professor Dastikoppa sir being very encouraging and supportive,who is immensely interested and knowledgeable in the topic related to web,web search, and everything in between.His knowledge has no bound,can dedicate another blog to our favorite sir. :) But this project wasn't well received by other lecturers,as they said it is almost impossible to do.

Now come Wolfram|Alpha,a completely new concept which is set to launch in about a week — likely on May 18.. It cannot be called a search engine as it merely doesn't search the query through index in the pages,but it actually calculates and processes the data you require.Though the looks of it resemble Google or Ask me but the similarity ends here.Wolfram|Alpha has a unique technique,it takes your query,processes it in such a way that the data you require is calculated from various sources,this data may not be available on a single web page at all.What Wolfram|Alpha does has never been done before.It can produce the exact data you require....

The service is built on four pillars: a massive amount of data, that the company has collected from various sources; a computational engine built on top of Mathematica, one of Mr. Wolfram’s prior inventions; a system for understanding queries; and technology to display results in interesting ways.
Mathematica is a webpage of theirs which is already widely used in institutes and research. The link to it is here

http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html

In a talk at Harvard Law School, Stephen Wolfram, a well-known mathematician, scientist and entrepreneur, gave a demonstration of his soon-to-be released Web service which promises to answer all sorts of questions.
It can actually solve any mathematical equations and even display the steps it followed to solve it.This can be very useful for school and college students studying maths and also to research mathematicians.
If you want to check out the tides in your near by sea before you go for a swim or surf,you can query as "tides in______".You can easily avail the tides.
If you are a investor in the stock market,you want to compare the two companies Wipro and Infosys. Wolfram|Alpha can come to your help now.It can collect data of the two companies from different websites,merge them and display the result including stats,graphs to give you the perfect info you wanted.The sources for this data will be displayed below.With Google this is impossible.
Wolfram|Alpha isn't a search engine.
Many bloggers are crazy talking about this and many are excited aboutWolfram|Alpha beacause the plan seems so lofty.In a press-release video,Wolfram says the site aims to “compute whatever can be computed about the world.”

The homepage can be found here..

http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html

Will it change our lives.I hope it will.....

2 comments:

Ramakanth said...

Great blog girl, i havnt heard abt it before this, so sounds interesting and thanks for sharing the info :)

i also see that uve written some inumerous blogs, do hope to read them soon :)

cn catch my own blogs as well

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