The search engine you’ve never used, but should

Jackson Stiles
Jun 30, 2015, updated Jun 30, 2015

The internet has a brain, and its name is Wolfram Alpha.

Rather than simply finding and regurgitating information, this search engine marries, melds, culls, gleans and kneads it, giving you the best possible answer to what you ask.

That, at least, is what makes it unique. Last month, it tried to become just like everyone else by debuting image recognition – an inferior copy of what Google already does quite well.

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For now, Wolfram’s ability to read images is, by its own admission, limited, but it is learning. It is this ability to learn, like a brain, that makes the engine useful.

In a speech in 2010, its creator – computer scientist Dr Stephen Wolfram – said he dreamed ever since he was a kid (he published his first scientific paper at the age of 15) of making as much human knowledge as possible “computable”.

“I’d always assumed that to make progress, I’d essentially have to replicate a whole brain,” he said.

Stephen Wolfram wanted to create a search engine with a brain. Photo: stephenwolfram.com

Instead, Dr Wolfram gave us this beautiful, geeky guardian of facts. The Stephen Fry of search engines, if you will. The quiz master of the web.

For example, ask it ‘who is Kim Kardashian?’ and you are not greeted by X-rated images of the celebrity in various states of rumptastic undress, but instead a list of factoids, such as her height (1.57 metres), weight (54 kilograms) and middle name (Noel).

“It doesn’t come back with three million searches,” tech futurist Morris Miselowski told The New Daily.

“It comes back with 10 or so facts that are really tuned in to what it is you are looking for.”

To become truly intelligent is the goal.

“What it’s really pushing towards is artificial intelligence. That was always where it was headed – to know more about what we were looking for than we did,” Mr Miselowski said.

This, it seems, is the future.

“Google and the other search engines are very much heading in that direction,” he said.

“We’ll come to a time very quickly where search engines as we know them will be old and antiquated and we’ll wonder how we ever bothered with a million different answers to something.”

Wolfram Alpha works by using “very sophisticated algorithms” to pull together information from reliable sources, said University of Technology Sydney senior lecturer Maureen Henninger, an information retrieval expert.

“It’s a terrific search engine for facts and computation,” Ms Henninger said.

“I use it all the time for when I want a fact, an actual fact.

“Whereas if you use Google, it’s going to do a whole lot of personalised searching and contextualising according to your comfort zone, and so on.”

Here are some of the cool things it can do.

If you’re smart enough to make sense of probabilities, you can get poker tips. Photo: Getty

Generate a new login

Type in ‘create password’ and fiddle with the options that appear to save yourself the headache of inventing one.

Probabilities

Type in ‘poker hand probabilities’ to find out your chances of winning your bet.

Track satellites in real time

Type in ‘International Space Station’ to find out over what part of the Earth the research facility is currently hovering.

Find words

Can you remember part of a word, but not the whole thing? Just type in the bits you remember and fill in the bits you don’t with a line.

Track space stations and satellites from your study. Photo: Getty.

For example, ‘_cious’ returns just one result: ‘vicious’.

Plan your exercise regime

Type in something like ’30 min walk calories’ and Wolfram will tell you how many calories you can expect to burn, depending on factors like your speed, gender and weight.

Find yourself

Not quite in the metaphysical sense. But type in ‘where am i?’ and Wolfram will use your IP address to calculate just that.

Website battles

Want to quickly compare the ranking and traffic of two websites? Type both addresses into the search bar with “vs” in between and you’ll have the answer.