Snipped from TechnologyReview.com.

If you are an infophile like me, then you may love this new computational “search” engine as much as I do. Woldram’s new project called WolframAlpha is very intersting. Then, when you consider this project is in an alpha state, meaning it is still in the beginning stage of development, you should be very excited to see where this is going in, say, 5 years.

Check it out for yourself at WolframAlpha.com. Type in all kinds of things that you are interested in. Speed of light, population of Uganda, how many websites are on the world wide web, the acidity of Coke. Anything, and it gives you data. Awesome!

Here is a small portion of the article:

This Monday, I had a chance to visit with researchers at Wolfram Research, in Champaign, IL, who are frantically putting the final touches on Wolfram Alpha, the new “computational knowledge engine” from physicist Stephen Wolfram.

This engine is meant to go live in two or three weeks; with it, you’ll be able to enter “GDP Germany Japan” and get not a list of Web pages, but comparative charts on the economic output of those two nations. Or you can enter “GATACTTCA” and find the spots on the human genome where that sequence appears.

Everybody at Wolfram Research characterized the new engine as something complementary to, and not in competition with, Google. (In short: Google uses elaborate means to find you the right Web pages, while Wolfram amasses databases and deploys myriad equations to compute answers for you.)

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