The Second Floor Librarians

Have you played with WolframAlpha yet? It’s a great new online info tool, and it was released to the public on May 18th.

The slogan for WolframAlpha says it’s a “computational knowledge engine.” It’s not a search engine like Google or Yahoo. What Google, Yahoo, etc. do is index the contents of websites and allow you to search them. When you do a search, they will give you a list of websites that contain the words you search for.

What makes WolframAlpha different is that it doesn’t search the web. It searches its own data sets. (Those of you with a math, science, or engineering background probably know all about the software program Mathematica. Wolfram Research is the company that produces this product.)

Anyway, WolframAlpha has a lot of data at its disposal, and it also uses publicly accessible data (census data, weather data, etc.) in its database.

So what does all this mean? It means when you search WolframAlpha with a query that is quantitative (not qualitative), you’ll get a numerical answer, instead of a list of links which you need to click on to find the answer.

And they present the answer in a visually pleasing way, often with more additional information than you would expect.

Maybe an example would help. Someone asked me today if Vancouver, BC is about the same size as Portland. I typed Vancouver Portland into WolframAlpha. This is a screenshot of part of the answer I got:

This example shows how WolframAlpha only returns results that are numerical, computable, etc. It won’t tell you which city has better restaurants, or which one is cheaper to visit. But it will give you numbers associated with your query.

There’s an incredible wealth of information available with WolframAlpha. If you take a look at their search examples page, you’ll start to get an idea of all the amazing things you can do with it.

Have fun!

Posted by Lisa, a second floor librarian