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May 21, 2009
Got Questions?
By Don Martelli
Ever wanted to know the population of Wales, Wisconsin? What plant family a pea is from? How many single-spaced pages 35,000 words in Finnish equate to? How about the heart disease risk of 50-year-old men?
Ask no more, Wolfram|Alpha is here (from the Web site):
Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
Wolfram|Alpha is a computational knowledge engine (read: not Google) that provides answers with real supporting data and facts. On the surface it sounds like a great concept, but the jury is still out on its use and whether or not it is a true Google (or Wikipedia for that matter) competitor.
One simple thing Wolfram|Alpha can help our teams with is answering those pesky (yet extremely important) metric questions. For example, what is the daily visitor total of Mashable.com? What about the circulation of Readers Digest vs. People Magazine?
Wolfram|Alpha is a good example of technological innovation colliding with discovery. It will be interesting to see how this service evolves and whether it will compete with (or as act as a supplement to) Google and Wikipedia as key information sources.
Posted by staff at May 21, 2009 01:12 PM
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