Just the Facts, Please: Hands On With the WolframAlpha Computational Browser

WolframAlpha, which launched today, isn’t your typical search engine. While Google, Yahoo, or MSN will spit back a range of popular news sites, blogs, photos, and other motley sources, WolframAlpha specializes in quick facts. Want to find reviews for Star Trek? You’re out of luck. But if you want to look at the cast list, or find out when it was released, WolframAlpha has you covered. To be sure, facts such as these (or Vogue‘s subscription base or the height of Mount Vesuvius) might seem esoteric. But we all, I’m sure, have random questions floating around our minds, and I’m sure we’re all guilty of spending hours prowling the Web, going on Wikipedia tangents, as I like to think of them. Regardless of whether you’re a student, reporter, or just plain curious, it’s convenient to get facts right away, without having to click on, say, Wikipedia and imdb.com, the movie database, separately. (In fact, I’m curious to learn, in the comments, what random things you’d search for.) I started out easy in my hands-on, typing in “66 grams ounces.” Almost immediately it spat back 2.328 ounces, precisely the conversion I had in mind. When we typed in “Galapagos Islands,” we were presented with a map, the  names of their various islands, their human population (a trick question, mostly), and their square footage. I could have gotten all this information on Wikipedia, of course, but WolframAlpha’s white interface and orange accents are easier on the eye, as is its paragraph-less list of facts. In addition to the conversions and geography, other topics include stocks, weather, dates and times, socioeconomic data, people and history, and a variety of hard sciences, among others. If you ever want more information (say, information about the rare wildlife native to those Galapagos Islands), there’s a link to perform a Web search instead. When we clicked that link, a new tab opened in Firefox, and Google, our default search engine, took over the search. WolframAlpha is free and, as of today, available to the public. Sound off in the comments with your own first impressions (and let us know the odd things  you chose to search for).