Wolfram|Alpha

Most of us have got accustomed to the google search engine for our daily requirements. What if there was a search engine which went a step ahead and gives you a handful of computational answers depending on your search query?

Enter Wolfram|Alpha (http://www94.wolframalpha.com). The next generation search engine which might not kill google but it is definitely an alternative to many of the questions that google does not answer at one shot.

It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. Eventually you should be able to ask it about essentially any kind of systematic factual knowledge. You can get an idea of what it covers today by looking at the examples. It gives you real time answers on weather, stock quotes, time zones, all of mathematical computations, chemistry, physics, socio economic, people, culture etc..

You will get hooked onto it once you have started using it. Spent about 10 minutes on the site and found out some interesting details

• My surname is ranked 831st in the world and one in every 7133 people have this surname. So guess it’s not very uncommon.
• I’m 10,377 days old and there was only 11 hours of daylight on the day I was born.
• 1 million rupees is currently valued at $20,980.
• My country is ranked 7, 2 and 12 among the biggest countries in terms of area, population and GDP respectively.
• I’ve learnt the full native name for my country just now. Shame on me!

Stephen Wolfram and his team certainly weren’t short of humor when they built this search engine. People have been finding some interesting easter eggs within Wolfram Alpha, triggered by specific questions or events. Ben Parr has posted a collection of these which at

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/wolfram-easter-eggs/

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/better-wolfram-easter-eggs/

Would definitely recommend everybody to spend some time time on Wolfram|Alpha, go through the examples, screencast, community forum.. You will certainly learn something new every time you pay a visit.