WOLFRAMALPHA is HERE; SHOULD GOOGLE RUN?

You may not have heard about it but there is a huge buzz amongst the scientific community, Internet geeks and voyeuristic wanna-be polymaths like myself about the launch of a new search engine, www.wolframalpha.com. Some have hailed it as the coming of the elusive google killer and others (I see some truth in this) as just another one of those "mathy" thingys that only fascinate geeks.

Wolfram is not google and to be fair, does not pretend to be google. In fact, if you search for a geographical entity, say a country, one of your options is to "view satellite photo" which directs you to Google maps. Google maps is owned by Google!

Wolfram will come in handy to people who are out to get hard facts, especially figures, numbers, stats, graphs etc. You can get a real time exchange rate of KES to USD and in addition a graph indicating past trend. The same thing with other searches such as "Kenya GDP" (see graph below)

 which gives you not just current figures but also puts them in a historical context. You also have the option of downloading the data as PDF.

A search for the major languages in Kenya brings up not only the number of people who speak those languages and the location of where the languages are spoken, but also the numeral names from one to ten. Maasai returns the following results among other important data:

One thing that you will get on Wolfram and not anywhere else is the distance from your local town (I mean local as in ushago) to the nearest major town. For instance, Nyeri to Othaya or Mandera to Isiolo. In addition you also get a few facts about the areas even though not every little hermit is covered yet since Wolfram is still in development.

To compete with Google, Wolfram will have to move beyond the scientific precincts and embrace the average Joe. So far, the search site, perhaps owing to its technical origin from mathematica, leans more towards being more of a tool for the science and math heads.