Wolfram Alpha (written on the webpage as Wolfram|Alpha) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009. It was was voted the grea...
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Wolfram Alpha (written on the webpage as Wolfram|Alpha) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would. It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009. It was was voted the greatest computer innovation of the year by Popular Science.
Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram Alpha then computes and provides answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data. Wolfram Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one. In this way it has many parallels with Cyc, a project aimed since the 1980s at developing a common-sense inference engine.
Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram...
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