The brainchild of Dr Stephen Wolfram, a British physicist, the computational search engine soft launched at the end of last week, but was fully unveiled on Monday. Wolfram Alpha is a natural search engine, which filters information and data stored in its own vast databases to answer specific search queries. The aim is to return a single search result with the right answer, rather than a list of thousands of web pages which may or may not contain the information requested, as is the case with other search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!. This is because Wolfram Alpha doesn’t crawl the web for its answers like Google does. It actually searches its own huge database of factual data. Dr Wolfram's brother, Conrad Wolfram, who is the website’s creator and strategic director of the company, told The Telegraph: “If you use a search engine, it’s a bit like a librarian who gives you a whole set of papers that you need to look through to get the answer. If you use Wolfram Alpha, it’s more like having your own personal analyst who takes the question you’ve got and tries to come back with a specific set of answers unique to your question.” Early user response has been mixed. The search engine has been praised for its extensive database and detailed results, however the single answer it selects for the users is not always the best one in terms of relevancy, prompting some users to prefer Google’s range of results. Last week Google announced its own take on computational search with the launch of its new tool, Google Squared. It allows users to type in a specific query and receive a list of information that relates to that search term. For example, a search for London boroughs will return a list of all boroughs alphabetically, along with links to relevant websites and information about population and the leader of the council. The results are presented in a grid, and users can remove columns of unwanted information or add a column of data they would prefer to see. ( www.telegraph.co.uk )
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