Wolfram|Alpha
Wolfram|Alpha is a new search engine created by Wolfram Research, the company also behind Mathematica. It’s based on the idea that with typical search engines, only questions that have been asked and answered before can be answered. Nothing new can be answered. So, Wolfram Research created a new “computational knowledge engine” that allows a person to find answers to new questions.
Wolfram|Alpha is not your run-of-the-mill search engine. If you type in “Owen Wilson,” you will not get a list of websites about the actor. Instead, you’ll get one page generated by Wolfram|Alpha that details his full name, date and place of birth, and even his “timeline.”
To give you a better idea of what this computational knowledge engine can do, here are a few searches I did and the results I received:
First, I searched for “April 12, 1985, New York,” when and where I was born. Wolfram|Alpha returned with a number of interesting facts about that great day. First, it told me the time difference from the day I searched: 24 years, 1 month, 30 days, or 1261 weeks, or 8827 days, or 24.17 years. I could also see that the high that day was 64 degrees and the low was 44 degrees. Well, that was pretty cool. I’m not sure where else I would go for information like that. My parents certainly can’t just rattle that stuff off. So, impressed, I moved on to another search.
I typed in “1 slice of American cheese, 1 english muffin, 3 oz. tomato sauce,” not necessarily the best recipe for English muffin pizzas, but it would be good enough for my purposes. Wolfram|Alpha came back with the individual nutrition facts, displayed just like you would see on a food package, and the physical properties of each food. It also had a link to find out the total nutrition facts. This recipe has 299 calories in all, in case you were wondering.
I was really impressed after that search, so I wanted to see what would happen if I searched for the address of my new house. “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” Well, that wasn’t what I planned on getting. I was hoping for the latitude and longitude of my house. Wishful thinking, I guess. So I just searched for the town: “Groton, CT.” As I expected, Wolfram|Alpha returned with all kinds of data on the city.
Basically, Wolfram|Alpha is a really cool, useful search engine, but not if you are looking for a list of websites that you can choose from. It does have a sidebar where you can do a regular search, but I’d much rather use another search engine, say like Google or the new search engine Bing, for a regular search. Speaking of which…
Bing
“Bing” is the sound I should hear when I get a search result from this new search engine. Bing is a new “decision engine” from MSN. Since I use Hotmail by MSN, I received an e-mail introducing Bing, but I wasn’t curious enough to try it until I started looking into new search engines. While Bing is not a completely new concept like Wolfram|Alpha, it is certainly worth trying, especially if you use Google. Like Wolfram|Alpha, I did a number of test searches. But before I even typed a search into the input box, I couldn’t help but notice how nice it was to see a background picture of Las Vegas. Not only was the picture cool, but when I moved the cursor over certain parts of the picture, small comments or facts popped up.
Anyway, my first search was “April 12, 1985, New York”—the same search I did on Wolfram|Alpha. Bing provided me with a list of links, like Google, that included news and sports results from that date and place.
Upon finishing my second search for “1 slice of American cheese, 1 English muffin, 3 oz. tomato sauce,” I noticed that the left sidebar of Bing displayed my search history. Such information would certainly be useful if I was doing research for a school paper or work project. The results for my “recipe” were again a list of links to recipe and health sites. This results page was nothing like Wolfram|Alpha, but it was certainly comparable to Google.
My next search was for “weather Groton, CT.” My goal was to see if Bing provided me with a list of websites with www.weather.com being first, like Google, or if it had something better to show me. Surprisingly, I found this search to be more helpful on Bing than on Google. Bing displayed a basic five-day forecast right there. I didn’t have to click on a link to see the weather, but if I wanted to, I could, since www.weather.com was first in a list of links right below the forecast. Another feature that popped up on the left sidebar was “Related Links.”
My last test of Bing was to see what it meant for the search to be “live.” I thought that Google’s news results were as recent as it got, so I gave it a try. Around 7 AM on the morning I was testing out these search engines, there was a plane crash in an airport somewhere in Connecticut. I didn’t know much about it, so I searched for “plane crash CT.” It was about noon by the time I was searching for the news stories, and I assumed a few results would turn up on both search engines. Bing provided me with links to two articles that were only 4 hours old. That seemed pretty recent to me, and I assumed Google would provide me with the same results. Surprisingly, Google did not come up with anything related to the plane crash from earlier that morning. Instead, it came up with other articles that contained the words I searched for. This test showed me just how useful a live search is if you need the most recent articles.
Overall, I was impressed with Bing. It could certainly hold its own against Google. Bing had cool features, like the ability to preview a website by rolling over the orange dot next to the website’s link. It also displayed results in an image search, just like a photo program would, and you can sort the results by color, size, layout, style, and person. There is no way to sort the images you get from Google. I did, however, have one failed search using Bing. I did an image search on both search engines for my new house. Google listed the picture of my house second, but Bing did not display my house at all. Despite this failed search, I would certainly consider using Bing instead of Google every once in a while. Need another reason to try Bing? Here are two funny commercials:
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I encourage you to play with Bing and Wolfram|Alpha and find out how each can best help you. Here’s one way to use all three if you are going from “NY to Orlando”: Wolfram|Alpha will tell you the distance between the two cities should you want to drive or just feel the need to know a random fact. Bing will let you search for flights directly from the search engine’s website if driving is too daunting. On Bing, you will also be able to compare flight prices by date on a graph and calendar. And it will still give you a list of links to sites if that’s what you want. Finally, Google will provide you with links to airline sites as well as travel guides, maps, and news. Once you figure out what kind of information you want, you can pick your search engine. These new search choices will certainly make searching easier.
Oh, and one more interesting result from my research: I thought Wolfram|Alpha could help me find the elusive Carmen Sandiego, so I asked, “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?” Their answer? “Not sure, but wherever she is, it isn’t here.”
Article originally posted on the VM Blog.
Anjali Petersen finds it very interesting that she was able to write this entire article, considering that she had awful writer’s block when asked to write her bio. Thus, all you will know about her for now is that she is so happy that it is finally summer!