The Taber Family Blog

Every now and then a tool comes along that offers you the ability to do things you would never have guessed you could do. To me there are a few memorable ones, including such things as super glue, digital cameras, the Internet, 802.11 wireless and the ubiquitous iPhone. Add to that list the Wolfram|Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine, or Wolfram|Alpha for short.

I’ve played around with the Wolfram Alpha tool a few times in the past, but after reading about the top 100 innovations for 2009, and that Wolfram|Alpha was named as the “Best of What’s New” Grand Award winner in the category of computing, I thought I’d check it out once again. I was not disappointed.

If you think of Google as a fantastic research tool, well, I think of it as providing you “road signs” to information that may or may not be what you’re ultimately looking for.  Wolfram|Alpha takes that idea and expands it into offering you the information you were looking for without having to blindly click link after link. And the type of information you can derive from Wolfram|Alpha is in my estimation without boundaries. It has the ability to take your question in terms of a sentence, mathematical equation, dates, calculations, comparisons or just about anything and give you meaningful results almost instantly. Wolfram|Alpha is not designed to replace Google by any means, since it would be unfair to classify it as a simply a search engine. However in terms of quick and powerful data research, you simply can’t do any better.

Take it for a spin yourself and prepare to be amazed.  http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Or watch this video hosted by Stephen Wolfram himself. Make sure you’re sitting down first.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Oh, and if you take the Wolfram|Alpha and mix it with an iPhone, you get the a very powerful combination indeed! http://products.wolframalpha.com/iphone/