Hungry Like The Wolf

There's a lot of discussion about the new Search Engine, Wolfram Alpha, and how it might be a Google-killer (sorry, no, that's not what it's meant for). Thoughts after the jump.

I haven't been keeping up much with Wolfram Alpha, but seeing what it can do has been impressive. To summarize, it is a statistics engine, which brings up a page of graphs and charts that correspond to the search item on a single, summarized page. It's like checking on a national census and mixing it with an encyclopedia, and unlike Wikipedia, it's accurate and validated by professionals. I must say, it looks like an invaluable resource for research (and schoolwork, so it's a bummer it didn't come out 4 years sooner).

Issues that come up are the obvious "getting the topic correct" - luckily, from what I've seen, most people tend to search just one word (e.g. "Apple" or "Linux") so that should be okay, but it gets a bit difficult when people ingrained to use phrases start typing in stuff (e.g. "Linux Error Installation Time-Out Kubuntu"). Also, the article discusses the problem with the cumbersome name (Wolfram Alpha) - it truly isn't as easy to remember as Google or Yahoo. In keeping with the Wolf theme, I'd suggest going with something like "Hunting" or "Tracking."

It's been a while since my last post (I've been doing this to an old laptop) but hey... it's still only about a week...