Finally WolframAlpha has been released and I am deeply impressed by it’s genius.
Most reviewers so far have been impressed or wondering what the hype is all about. Usually Alpha gets compared to Google, which is a big mistake.
Google is a basically a search engine – Alpha is a "computational knowledge engine". It’s not meant to find pictures of your favourite celebrity pr0n or lookup an address to buy Lederhosen in your town.
Alpha is like a smart research robot, it can compare and compute numbers in all shapes, sizes and forms.
With Google you can find the population size of Germany, France and Italy – but only Alpha can compare them for you, make a nice graph and sort them accordingly.
So that tagline "computational knowledge engine" has to be taken literally and seriously. If your question is not about computing or comparing anything then don’t use Alpha.
Most of us mere mortal don’t have any such questions for Alpha, but for researchers, students, engineers, journalists and doctors Alpha will be a Godsend. Look here for many excellent examples what Alpha can do.
Alpha is pretty young, so it doesn’t have data on everything so far –and we users are new to this great tool. I am sure it will be phenomenal as Wikipedia in it’s area.
