Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha (own spelling: Wolfram | Alpha ) is based on the software Mathematica Internet service for locating and displaying information that is developed by Wolfram Research.

Unlike an ordinary search engine, the main objective is not the finding of facts available on the Internet only through search strategies, but the processing of facts by specific algorithms results. Wolfram Alpha is therefore a semantic search engine. The results are synthetic responses, from a simple summation to eigenvalues ​​of differential equations or planetary orbits. Wolfram Alpha will fill a gap function by search engines and answering questions.

Development

The project is being developed by Stephen Wolfram and a team of hundreds of employees since 2005. Since May 2009 working world also known as Data Curators, returning data from the respective region. A Data Curator provides data on any topic. Similarly, there are so-called Preview Site tester worldwide.

As already mentioned in publication, the project offers (since January 2012) in addition to the free version a Pro version. Students and pupils is thereby made ​​a reduced from $ 4.99 to $ 2.99 per month offer. As a new feature over 60 different file formats can be uploaded and analyzed. Moreover, the interactivity is increased with the site through a plugin.

Results

In contrast to the currently dominant search engine, whose task is to find appropriate field to query websites, Wolfram Alpha tries to find a substantive answer to the query. These calculated Wolfram Alpha, the results of queries based on an extensive database and the operating principle of cellular automata, so it does not operate according to the principle of the crawler conventional search engines. Because the search engine tries to deliver a single, concrete semantic response to the request, the user is also presented no list of topic-related web pages, but the result in the form of data, graphics or images. The focus of the search engine is accordingly also to the exact sciences, other requests will be processed only generally insufficient.

The semantics of the search queries must follow a certain regularity, so that the search engine can process it. Despite his ability to interpret natural language, Wolfram Alpha delivers on many searches no meaningful answers.

For some time alpha tungsten also has the possibility of evaluating social networks. For this purpose, initially released a feature in August 2012, with the personal Facebook profile of the user can be evaluated by the search engine. Here, a comprehensive permission to access the user's personal data is necessary third profiles can not currently analyze.

Comparison

Compared to search engines can be found with Wolfram Alpha right answers. Source information can be found on every page request at the bottom. So the answer in days, for example in the question directly given exactly "How old is Barack Obama? "; when clicking on " Show details " can be found as boundary the birth of Barack Obama.

Due to the complexity of the calculations inquiries are usually slower than a search engine, however, is the result directly on the answer page and not, as in some search engines, behind a hyperlink. Moreover, the data base is in alpha tungsten generally not as great as with search engines. On the other hand, generates Wolfram Alpha by calculations data that are not found on indexed web pages, such as some integrals of composite functions together with the " human " calculation method or nutrition tables of arbitrary combinations of different foods.