It may sound a little biased(it’s really not) but i couldn’t be convinced more with a web service called ‘WolframAlpha’. I simply can’t stop myself from foreseeing WolframAlpha as THE NEXT BIG THING on the web.
It’s very likely that a couple of years later, ‘WolframAlpha‘ will be as familiar as Wikipedia or even Google to most of the population on the web.
(Enough of the praise) Getting straight to the point, it’s possibly the ‘Most Intelligent’ web based system ever created and certainly what the World Wide Web was deprived of.
‘Wolfram Alpha’ is a ‘Computational Knowledge Engine’ that neither ‘indexes’ (think of Google) nor ‘looks up'(think of Wikipedia or Dictionary) but actually ‘Computes factual results’ based on the query made.
WolframAlpha is meant to compute all your factual queries(queries that have a computable solution), irrespective of the complexity of computation. This computation engine uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, seeded with raw data and sophisticated algorithms to compute factual solutions to user queries.
According to Nova Spivack, who had a 2 hour long session with the creator of WolframAlpha…
Their vision seems to be creating a system which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).
Many folks are tagging WolframAlpha as the ‘Google Killer’ but that’s way far from a sensible comparison. Wolfram isn’t a generic search engine. It has its own speciality of computing factual results and would hardly be a pain for Google in Search engine domain.
But WolframAlpha has its own set of advantages that makes it a ‘high utility and exclusive’ web service. For instance, if somebody in this entire world has not published a solution to a particular ‘problem’ on web then Google cannot help out folks having that ‘problem’, simply because Google can only find and list those webpages that have already been created by somebody. On the other side, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the solution to a problem and therefore not limited to a set of questions with defined solutions.
Another thing that’s noticable about ‘WolframAlpha’ is its fast & efficient computation. Unlike most computation based systems existant on web, ‘WolframAlpha’ not only computes whatever you ask it ( try this, this, this and this), it also takes care that you don’t run out of your patience while Wolfram is busy computing the result for you.
And yes…as Wolfram employs tested computation methods and algorithms to get the results for you, it can NEVER go wrong. Google, on the contrary fetches you results that may be right or wrong(it’s all a matter of SEO, isn’t it). Hence there’s always an uncertainty associated with Google’s results but you can be well assured that Wolfram will always be Right.
In the end, WolframAlpha is something i’ve felt excited about, after really long time and reckon that it’s certainly THE NEXT BIG THING on the web.