Wolfram|Alpha: Is This What a Search Engine Turns into When It Grows Up? (Page 3 of 4)

A person on a 1850 calorie a day diet will be able to figure out their own meal plan, with foods they enjoy, and find out how much of what they can eat to meet that goal. I'd find that an attractive alternative to a canned plan from Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

Right now, I'd like to know if his engine could tell me how many Jelly Belly jelly beans could fit in a quart glass jar. When I search on Google, I find that people have asked the question before- on answerbag.com, among other places, but no one has posted an answer. Other matches on Google give ideas for formulas to find the answer- and there are answers for how many Jelly Bellys in an ounce- but a simple answer does not pop up.

If you ask how many Jelly Belly beans would fit inside the Statue of Liberty, you'll find Google doesn't seem to have a match with anyone who has asked the question before. (Strange mind, I know...) All of the matches in the first 100 choices that came up were mashups of pages. Of course, I had trouble trying to find data on what the interior volume of the Statue of Liberty is, so Wolfram|Alpha may not be able to answer either. I wonder, though, how many Jelly Belly beans would it take to fill the interior volume of the Great Pyramid at Giza?

Maybe the average person will find themselves using it most often for trivia. But sometimes they could find it handy to just ask “How much will it cost to ship a 16” x 20” x 6” package weighting 7.5 pounds from an address in zip code 10001 to 27 Main Street, in zip code 13607 by UPS ground? That sort of data is likely to end up in Wolfram|Alpha, and it means you don't need to go to the UPS site, enter the weight into a field, figure out if your package dimensions move you into a different class, and then have them calculate the answer.

It will let you do certain useful calculations in one easy step. If you are building your child a tree house, you can find out whether you should get half inch plywood or three quarter inch plywood to safely hold the weight of 5 100 pound kids. Not only that, it will probably give you a graph showing how much weight either thickness of plywood will hold.

But the real value of the answer engine is currently for students, scientists, professionals and technical people. The engine already holds a vast amount of information about diagnoses and disease. Once it can take input form a physician about symptoms; If you are a GP and have someone come into the office with flushed cheeks, easy bruising, high blood sugar, twitches and a severe ache in the lower left quadrant of their abdomen, you won't need to wish you had access to Dr. Gregory House. You could type in the information to Wolfram|Alpha, and find out matches it has for those symptoms, and the additional tests to get an exact answer. You can also get suggested treatment. It might make a real difference to how well someone will recover, based on how quickly you can begin treating them, with an indexed medical database at your command, and do almost instantly what might be hours of tedious searching for matching symptoms.

Civil engineers and architects could feed in information about un-built structures and desired building materials, and find out what materials have the tensile strength for their needs. Chemistry professors could find out the exact supplies and amount of each chemical they need on hand for a particular class to carry out an particular experiment.

And students can relate information they understand to other pieces of information.

Well, Wolfram|Alpha still does not know much about plywood, disappointingly enough.

However, there are queries which give answers that make information come alive for the searcher.

I asked about the gravitational pull of the moon.

It gave the standard answer, 5.328 ft/s^2 (feet per second squared)

It also gave some comparisons that make those numbers seem real and immediate.

~~ 0.43 x acceleration from 0 to 60 mph of a 2001 Jaguar XK8 (~~ 3.8 m/s^2 )

~~ 0.44 x maximum acceleration during the launch of a Saturn V rocket (~~ 3.7 m/s^2 )

~~ 0.85 x acceleration from 0 to 60 mph of a 1983 Buick Century (~~ 1.9 m/s^2 )

Many of us have driven or ridden in a Buick. We may not have ridden in a Jaguar, but we have seen one on TV or in a magazine.

We can now relate that to the force the moon has on the ocean- and how that causes tides.

Even more interestingly, it seems that a 2001 Jaguar XK8 has more power than a Saturn V rocket did. That is awesome.

Wolfram|Alpha, as Jonathan Wylie points out in his article the Top 10 Search Engines for Students, can do things other search engines cannot. It brings computational power into the hands of students, and can correlate multiple pieces of information in its answers, giving them new avenues of research.