The biggest news on the Internet today is that the Wolfram | Alpha is finally thrown open to the public!  What’s Alpha, you ask?  It’s a “computational knowledge engine”, of course.  What was that all about?!  Ok, ok, let’s take it slow and easy…

It’s not the best choice of name, but the Wolfram | Alpha is a service worth taking note of.  It’s the next big thing to hit the Internet in a long, long time.  A comprehensive writeup on Twine offers the simplest and best explanation:

Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.

Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.

It’s been launched less than 24 hours earlier.  And already, there have been numerous writeups explaining how the “Alpha” does not directly compute with Google since it does not lookup data from existing pages (like Google), but instead computes answers to questions by crunching all sorts of numbers and algorithms. 

My take is that, over time, Wolfram | Alpha will complement what the ubiquitous Google does for millions of users on the Net.  So, if it’s usable info on the weather in your city or a statistic like the number of internet users in Poland, try the “Alpha” and you will soon realize the difference that ‘intelligent computation’ can make to your web searches. 

If you’re still unclear about what you can use it for, take a look at some of the examples it can deliver effortlessly.

The Wolfram | Alpha is here.  And, it marks the beginning of a new era in Search technology…

P.S. Also, read this article on how the Alpha may very well become Google’s best friend!