Breaking news tutorials - #27 - WolframAlpha in the wild

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Breaking news tutorials

#27 / May 19, 2009 / 3:31 min.

WolframAlpha in the wild

The latest challenger to Google's search dominance is Wolfram|Alpha. It's a contextual search engine and differs from other search engines in many key ways. WolframAlpha is being hailed as a victory for the "semantic web," where computers become more adept at understanding the context in language, as opposed to asking users to adjust to computer language.

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- Check out Wolfram|Alpha

- Type in a birth date, like June 10, 1949 and add a city, like Detroit Michigan.

- Wolfram gives you all kinds of information about that date including:

- How long it's been since that date and today.
- Elevation of the city.
- Population of the city at that time.
- Format of the date.

- Type in the names of two companies to see how they compare on many levels.

- Type in a math problem like 25 * 10 - 12 and get the answer instantly.

- You can put in any math formula.

- Ask questions and check your results.

- There's a toolbar available for Internet Explorer, Firefox 2 and 3.

- Wolfram|Alpha helps make the world's knowledge computable.