Wolfram Alpha
I posted previously about Stephen Wolfram’s new (but mostly secret) search approach. Some more about the method was recently revealed by Wolfram in a demo at Harvard. It seems to be more like an interactive encyclopedia than the conventional search engine. The New York Times Bits blog reports:
While search engines like Google, by and large, find things that already exist on the Internet — Web sites, photos, videos, blogs — Wolfram Alpha answers questions, often by doing complex, and new computations.
It’s hard to judge a product from a demo, but by the looks of it, Wolfram Alpha is impressive.
What can it do? It can describe places, like Lexington, Mass., by its vital statistics, such as location, population, weather, etc. It can compare Lexington with Moscow. If you type “LDL 180,” it will tell you the percentile of the population with higher or lower cholesterol and show you the answer on a chart. If you tell “LDL 180 male 45,” it will adjust the chart for gender and age group. It can chart the life expectancy of a male age 40 in Italy or tell you who was president of Brazil in 1928.
Wolfram says the project is still in its early stages so its actual impact remains unclear.
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