Monday, May 18, 2009

The next big thing on the net

Someone directed me to a link to the new project by Wolfram people called Wolfram Alpha saying that it was the next big thing on the net. My initial reaction to the claim was - "Ah, yet another big claimer!"

But 5 minutes into the site, and I was taken over by it. This project seeks to integrate all knowledge into one. You can put in any query and it gives you the "right" results. Much unlike Google, which directs you to further sites that might or might not (though they generally do) contain relevant information - Alpha gives you numbers and statistics about anything that can be represented by numbers. Like you could key in GDP of South Africa - And know all that you wanted to know in terms of numbers. Likewise if you key in "GE" in the stocks section, you could see how the trend for GE stocks has been for the last 1 week, 1 month, 1 year and 5 years! besides it shows you its market capitalization and the beta. If you search for AIDS deaths, then you get statistics for deaths across the world.

This thing could indeed become the next big thing in the net!

PS- The afore mentioned friend was Abhishek Gandhi, fondly(?) known as Tool here at IITM. He claims his connect to the first family of the country, but we are all too used to people who fake surnames to gather mileage !

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3 comments:

Gandhi said...

You acknowledge the other Abhishek in your other post and dont care to acknowledge me (another Abhishek) in this post..Kya random hai be tu..

Ankit Ashok said...

Tu mera jigri dost hai- par if since you dont blog, I dint know if you had a blogger id.

Ankit Ashok said...

Waise I am doing the world a huge favor by storing immense amount of randomness - if the entropy was to be liberated, it would have caused chaos. :P