Have you tried Wolfram alpha?

I’m very impressed by some of what it has to offer. In my mind, it’s more of a competitor to encyclopedias (and wikipedia, although not user-generated, well, not totally) than to Google.

Wolfram alpha assumes too much. The results it offers when I look up my hometown are quite impressive. I’m not very sure though if I would use it like I use Google. Alpha offers pdf downloads (cool), a reference list for their result sources (very cool). It’s in many ways what everyone expected the Semantic Web to be (funnily enough, Alpha doesn’t know what to do with the Semantic Web).

The presentation of results is intuitive, and very usable. But the fact that it can’t find info on the simplest of queries is a little disturbing. Some sort of mashup, where Alpha’s results would be followed by Google-style results (links) would be perfect. Sort of like Google does when the query involves some sort of conversion/calculation, stock info, and weather info. Entering “Weather Berlin” in Google returns the weather forcast, in addition to the usual array of links.

Google has some responses to Alpha, and I wouldn’t count them out just yet, they’ll have the stuff I mentioned above in no time.

Like I keep saying, it’s a very exciting time for people interested in technology, from social networking, to location awareness, extreme mobility, semantic knowledge and the cloud. Stay tuned!