Finally, it showed what the image would look like with some of the more common effects were applied, such as grayscale or negative. Then it gave us a view of the image with more and less contrast or color levels. jpg file, it returned the basic info on it, such as dimensions, file size and aspect ratio. But it will also accept images and other kinds of files. If it could only do all that with entered text, then Wolfram Alpha would already be pretty impressive. There are example entries that indicate that Wolfram Alpha is versed in everything from science to sports to literature to census data. In this case it told us it assumed we meant the note, and gave us a link to another results page if we meant the key of F-sharp instead.Īnd that is just the tip of the iceberg. When it has several possible assumptions to go on, the very first thing it reports is what assumption it made. This time Wolfram Alpha did make an assumption that we meant the note F-sharp as opposed to something else. It even offered to play the note for us through QuickTime. Wolfram Alpha shot back with the sheet music notation of F-sharp above middle C, where it was located on a piano keyboard, the notes that are in the F-sharp major and minor scales, its standard frequency in Hertz, and its MIDI note number. When we searched on “F-sharp” in search engines, we were, as you might expect, given a list of URLs to sites that contains the term “f-sharp” with or without the hyphen. When we switched out the word “integrate” with its symbol “∫” Google seemed to ignore it entirely, and gave us a search result based on the remaining words.Īnd math is just the beginning. Wolfram Alpha also returned the same information when we substituted some of the words with their mathematical symbols through its extended keyboard option. It also showed the formulas for other ways to approximate the area in case we needed those. However, Wolfram Alpha identified it as a definite integral (which defines the area under a curve on a graph), produced the properly written equation (the answer is 2, by the way), followed by a graph of the defined area. In fact, since that is one of the sample terms Wolfram Alpha uses to show off its product, the first link that showed up on a Google search of that phrase was to Wolfram Alpha. Yes, many traditional search engines can now produce an immediate answer to simple things like “how many kilograms in a pound.” However, for complex mathematical equations involving trigonometry or calculus, most engines would be lost.Ĭase in point: If I type “integrate sin x dx from 0 to pi” into a regular search engine, it will give me a list of links to pages that contain those words. Performance: A Ease of Use: A- Features: A Value: A Price: $5 per month, $3 per month for students Cons: Doesn’t give a list of links to sites like a classic browser. Pros: A lot of different input methods, app and widget makers. In fact, the company doesn't even call it that they have named it a “computational knowledge engine.” It will actually analyze your input - perform mathematical calculations, retrieve pertinent facts - and show answers on the topic in as many different ways as it deems pertinent. Wolfram Alpha Pro isn’t your ordinary search engine. Entire tables of data might need specific kinds of analysis, and an ordinary search engine is not up to the task. In science-oriented government offices, however, the answers that are needed aren’t run-of-the-mill, simple ones. If all you need is an answer to a question, a classic search engine will usually only be able to tell you where you might find the answer. This extra step (or possibly several steps to look at more than one of the proffered links) often involves an amount of effort disproportionate to the simplicity of the answer you are trying to find. Of course, this still means that you have to click on each link to see whether the website has the information you are actually need. As the years went by, search engines have gotten more refined and quite intelligent in predicting which links you want to see. You could enter a word or phrase, and the engine would return a list of links to sites related to what you’d entered. When the first centralized search engine came along in 1993, it was like a bolt from the blue. What would we do today without search engines?īefore they existed, the Internet was a trackless expanse that could only be explored by people who knew exactly what website or server they wanted to visit.
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