Wolfram Alpha, the much anticipated ‘search engine’ from the makers of Mathematica launched over the weekend. I knew from the moment I typed in ‘joshua gans’ that this was no ordinary search engine (there were no results!). It isn’t really a search engine but a tool. You can use it to find out statistics (including the readership of this blog), solve simple and complex mathematical equations, and things like that. I can imagine finding this very useful in my day to day work but that won’t be for everyone.
Anyhow, to really take off, whatever it does has got to become a verb. In our household, we adopted wolfing. My son asked if he could wolf ‘how large Australia is in square metres?’ This was the result.
Suffice it to say, I quickly got interested in what sort of funny entries the programmers at Wolfram might have done. So I wolfed this, this, this and this. Enjoy.
Core Economics 
I tried wolfing for a few things and it seems very nifty. One improvement I’d like to see is for it to show where/how it gets its results. In the case of mathematical calculations, there should be an option to show intermediate steps. When it shows factual results, it should identify the source, e.g., http://www54.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=size+of+the+universe should indicate where it sourced the information.
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Trying asking for the answer to “life the universe and everything’. These guys have a (geeky and scifi skewed)sense of humour too. If the system cannot answer (often because it is overloaded) you get the reply. “I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that..”
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Have a look at these searches from something awful:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wolfram-alpha.php
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