Decidedly My Favorite Reference Engine

[alexander]

So I am back from a photography seminar (that was thursday and friday so sorry for no posts, i'll see if i can make that up at some point).

 

I decided to talk about not really a search engine, i am a google boy and i will continue using google until there is anything better, and no i have nothing against bing. But to set the record straight bing isn't any better then google, some clever guys over at google decided to test their rivals by putting in some search queries and results that could not possibly be, and found that within a few weeks bing indeed started showing those search results for the same queries, so no neither google nor bing are any better really, they are exactly as good as the other, because bing shows the same results as google, eventually :)

 

But what i wanted to touch on is my new favoritestest tool ever, called WolframAlpha, if you havent played with it, you so totally should. Its a contextual search engine that doesnt search the web per se, but it does things. It can be a graphing calculator, it can keep track of units, it can do some prediction, it can list and graph history, it can calculate values, all based on a the searches you give it. You can use it to do your math homework, you can use it to show units mismatches, you can use it to calculate dietary values of your meals (approximate), you can use it to calcualte average annual inflation of the USD in the past 10 years, i find it to be the one part that i would like to have in google, and i use it sometimes as often as i use google :) (example: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+annual+usd+inflation+rate+from+2000+to+2010+%2F+10&a=ListOrTimes_List )

 

So share, play, and definitely report back and share your experiences (it can be weird at first)