Library Blogs Buzz Weekly

Blogs are buzzing about a new search engine called Wolfram Alpha, which uses computational algorithms and smart databases to answer questions.

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine for the hidden web. It goes out to various public and private databases and fetches relevant statistics.

So instead of developing crawlers that indexes all the web pages out there, Wolfram’s engineers spend time on identifying good databases and figure out how they can make them answer questions like “How many inhabitants are there in Norway?” or “What is the distance to the Moon?” in a meaningful way

The inventor of the new search engine is the scientist Stephen Wolfram, author behind the Mathematica computational software and the book, "A New Kind Of Science". Search Engine Land has more details.

Here is a link to a short video presentation by Stephen Wolfram on YouTube about WolframAlpha and links to posts from Stephen's Lighthouse and screenshots from ReadWriteweb.

It looks like Wolfram Alpha is going to be part of the search engine arsenal for every librarian. If this search engine presents a threat to Google, I am sure that Google will try anything to buy it .


Via:Pandia Search Engine News
http://www.pandia.com/sew/1718-wolfram-alpha-and-this-weeks-search-engine-news-may-2.html