Search engines are fine for finding things related to subjects you are interested in. But what if you want to know which is deeper, Lake Ontario or Lake Superior (answer: Lake Superior – 1332ft versus 735ft). Or what if you want to know the day of the week that Mt. Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii (August 24, 79AD was a Thursday). Or what if you wanted to know the heights of the 5 tallest existing buildings in New York City. Here they are:
Empire State Building - 1250ft
Bank of America Tower - 1201ft
New York Times Building - 1047ft
Chrysler Building - 1047ft
American International - 978ft
The tool for getting this kind of information? Wolfram Alpha. (cool name!)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
You can enter queries in regular English, and often enough, WolframAlpha can figure out what you mean and give you an answer you will find appropriate to your question. Want statistics on Google.com compared with Yahoo.com. WolframAlpha can give you that data – in a single query.
What can you use this for? Well – if you’re doing any kind of research, and you need answers to very specific questions, WolframAlpha can be a very good tool. It doesn’t replace search engines or sites like Wikipedia, but as a data query engine, I highly recommend it.
