Special Assignment #1

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that is designed to answer questions asked, not by finding web sites to supply the answer, but by searching available information and giving you an answer. It seems to work great in some applications, but not so great in others. Probably Wolfram Alpha's strong suit is performing mathematical computations.

I had never heard of Wolfram Alpha before this assignment. It does have its merits but it also has some shortcomings too. The biggest fault I see with it is it sometimes doesn't know how to interpret the question. Even if a question makes perfect sense to you, unless it's worded just right, Wolfram Alpha may not be able to give you an answer, or at least not the one you're looking for. I was able to find out the population of countries (China 1.35 billion, India 1.21 billion, and US 309 million) and it would show you graphs and tables with various breakdowns of the numbers (population growth, population density, etc. I learned the US population is 22% of China's and 25% of India's population. However, when I asked who had won the most World Series championships, Wolfram Alpha only gave me several definitions of "championship" (the answer should have been New York Yankees).

Google Squared

Google Squared operates in a similar fashion as Wolfram Alpha in that instead of referring you to web sites like Google would do, it gathers information for you. It doesn't answer specific question as much as it does research. When asked about the population of the US, instead of giving you a number it gives you a wide variety of related information about the US. From what I read, it is still in the developmental stages and was actually created to compete with Wolfram Alpha. I personally think I would find Google Squared more helpful because Wolfram Alpha's interpretive problems got me frustrated