Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha (written on the web page as Wolfram|Alpha) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009. It was voted the greatest computer innovation of the year by Popular Science.

Capabilities

The following are examples of queries using Wolfram Alpha. They are accompanied by links to the results of each search to illustrate the variety of answers that Wolfram Alpha provides to non-specific queries.

* mortgage 6%, 25 year, $140000 displays, among other things, repayment rates and graphs that represent capital vs. interest over time.
* life expectancy france 25 year old male which gives a survival analysis for a person of the given demographic.
* boiling point of water at 6 atm which returns a phase diagram alongside the 432.6 Kelvin result.
* lim(x->0) x/sin x yields the expected result, 1, a plot, and the series expansion. The button "show steps" provides a possible derivation of the result using L'Hôpital's rule.

Wolfram Alpha is also capable of responding to increasingly complex, natural-language fact-based questions such as:

* "Where was Mary Robinson born?"
* "How old was Queen Elizabeth II in 1974?"
* "What is the forty-eighth smallest country by GDP per capita?" yields Pakistan, $696.59 per year .

* "What is the speed of a swallow?" yields the assumption, "Assuming estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen African swallow", and the result, "there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)." This is a reference to a joke from the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail).
* When asked "What is the meaning of life?", it replies 42. This is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel, in which a supercomputer is told to calculate the meaning of life, and it finds the answer to be 42. These and all other "humorous" queries are individually written by programmers and not "understood" by the software on a deeper cognitive level.

Also, one can input the name of a website, and it will return relevant information about the site, including its location, site rank, number of visitors and more.

The database currently includes hundreds of data sets, including current and historical weather, drug data, star charts, currency conversion, and many others. The data sets have been accumulated over approximately two years, and are expected to continue to grow. The range of questions that can be answered is also expected to grow with the expansion of the data sets.