Any other news site you’ll read tonight will be talking about how Wolfram is the new ‘Google killer’. We fail to see how this is so. If anything, Wolfram is in competition with Wikipedia.

The service works with what they call “computational knowledge engine”, or what we call “providing answers yo questions”. Ask yourself what would you get if you spliced Google with Wikipedia, and you’ll find the answer is Wolfram Alpha. You search with keywords, and you’re provided with an ‘answer’, usually a paragraph containing information on the topics you searched – rather than linking you to a website (like any other typical web search engine would).

As well as providing answers to mathmatical calculations, Wolfram Alpha can also plot graphcs/charts to display statistics of things, for example you could plot weather events or the amount twitter followers Sporkings has.

[Our thoughts]
We certainly don’t think Wolfram is a Google killer, nor do we believe it’ll change online search forever. We do however believe this tool will be useful in education systems. Of course it could just die out instantly once the hype has ended, like other not-so cuil Google killers.