The launch of WolframAlpha has been brought forward and the service is now live ahead of its predicted launch date of Monday 18th May.
For those of you that have missed the Wolfram hype so far, the WA service is a search engine with a difference. Instead of using traditional search techniques the Alpha service relies on Mathematica, human input and a very clever search algorithm.
The end result is that any information that it can draw upon becomes computable, for example, if you want to know more about a certain date, type it in and voilà – a whole bunch of data about that day. If you’re expecting to get such-and-such was born information then you’re only halfway there, we used May 16th 1960 as an example and as you can see it goes a whole lot beyond. I’d had no idea it had been 17987 days since then nor which moon phase it had fallen in.
The potential for this revolutionary computational search engine is enormous, it truly will be a new way to discover information and the web.
The service isn’t too hot on popular culture right now, so a search for 50 cent might not yield quite what you were looking for, presuming you were indeed looking for ‘Fiddy’.
In fact, at the time of writing the service isn’t too hot generally, there seem to be quite a few teething issues but they are getting resolved quickly. We were just happy to finally be able to get our hands on this new tool; once its knowledge base has grown a little and the teething problems have passed this is going to be one of the most useful and powerful tools on the web.