We all love Google, Don’t we? After all, we use it daily. But, do you know that there is a better search engine than Google? Actually it’s not a search engine, instead it’s a Computational Knowledge engine known as Wolfram|Alpha. I’m not saying that it’s a “Google Killer” but it beats Google in many features.
Difference between Google and Wolfram Alpha
We all know that Google is a search engine which tracks results related to our search queries from different sites around the web while Wolfram Alpha doesn’t refer to websites for your search queries.
How is it better than Google?
You can use Wolfram Alpha to do Complex calculations (Trigonometry, Geometry etc), to know about Celebrities, Unit conversions, Statistics, Probability and several other tasks which Google can’t accomplish.
For example, I want the solution for the equation Sinx + Cosx =1, Wolfram Alpha took no more than 3 seconds to solve the problem.
It gives complete dimensions of any Gadget, when I searched for the term “iPad”; it came up with this result.
How is it not better than Google?
The only feature Wolfram Alpha lacks is “Instant search” which Google has introduced last year.
Topics
Wolfram Alpha’s knowledge base covers an immense range of areas. They include Mathematics, Units & Measures, Money & Finance, Statistics & Data Analysis, Dates & Times, Socio-Economic Data, Physics, Weather, Health & Medicine, Chemistry, Places & Geography, Food &Nutrition, People and History, Food & Nutrition….. It’s a never ending list! Head on to their Topics page for more info.
Live Mathematica
At the bottom of each Wolfram Alpha output page, there’s a button that says “Download Live Mathematica“.What that does is to download the results on the page as a Mathematica notebook. A notebook has many immediate advantages over Wolfram Alpha’s standard web presentation. First, the graphics are resolution-independent and resizable. Secondly 3D graphics can immediately be zoomed and rotated. But what’s more important is that you can take the output from Wolfram Alpha and actually compute with it in Mathematica.
Utilities
Wolfram Alpha also provides various utilities like Toolbars, Add-ons, Extensions, and Desktop Gadgets to access its search engine at anytime.
Their Extensions support all the modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Internet explorer, Safari and Opera.
If you are on Windows 7 or Vista then you can even download the Wolfram Alpha Gadget and use it right from your desktop. They also provide Desktop Widget for Mac OS X too!
Widgets
If you are thinking that Wolfram Alpha is just a Search engine, then you are wrong! They also develop Widgets! Widgets are mini-apps built on top of Alpha queries. You can build your own, or find useful widgets in the Widget Gallery. Share them in Facebook, Twitter, email, or anywhere else.
One such Widget is “Earthquakes” which shows the Earthquake affected areas in the global map.
This article is written by Saksham Talwar of BloggingJunction.Com who is an active writer on blogging, social media, SEO, etc. and blogs about blogging tips and tips to predict future pagerank.
A very Interesting article. Though Wolfram Alpha has some advantages over Google, the Google guys will surely adopt those adv. in their next update and beat Wolfram Alpha in no time. (like they do all the time).
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