Wolfram Alpha

When this concept of wolframalpha leaked out.. it was termed as a google killer... and Wikki smasher...  but then later on those very people who heralded it went to say that it is't such user frendly and does give information that the user is exactly looking for. yes i do agree if you want to know what is "Great wall of china" or which is the longest bone in your body then its better ask google or wiki. But if wanted to some real hard core math or scientific stuff they wolframalpha is the way to go!!! 

for example if yo wanted to find out your Body Mass Index(BMI) and if you go through google yo'll probably have to go through of website before you actually find one good, authentic site  but on the other hand wolframalpha makes your life way lot easier in this case atleast. All you have to do type " 85 kilos,6 feet 2 inches, BMI" in you search bar in wolfram thats it.. it gives you you BMI followed by a couple of self descriptive graphs and what should be your ideal BMI and where you stand currently and also the way it calculated it.

wolframalpha works like clockwork when it comes to coverting your simple plain english queries into hard data computing numerical answers to common sense questions. Ofcourse its not quite simple. what wolframalpha does not know is what a piece swim suit is or how many kinds of heinze ketchup are present, but what it knows it 10 trillion pieces of factual data, mathematical,socio-physical,biographical,physical,cultural,linguistic... etc... the list gones on. If not in detail it knows it roughly at least but there is one thing that it knows better than google or wiki- thats  how these 10 trillion pieces of data relate to one another.

impressive is't it??? not quite impressed?? let me paste a small paragraph from one of the tech crazy sites which claim to provide unbiased reviews on new and emergying technologies

"Wolfram Alpha's knowledge is impressive. You can drill down from national mortality rates to see where you fall in a distribution curve of height or weight, then further to calculate the calories you'll burn from your daily jog, then to the nutritional content of your breakfast and finally even examine chosen DNA sequences, bio-chemical reactions and particle physics.

In the other direction, you can pull up technical details on bridges and landmarks, then see routes between cities on a globe, including population and timezone data.

Expanding your focus, graphs of weather scale up to the paths of future solar eclipses, the actual distance today between the Earth and the other planets, interstellar astronomical data and ultimately, particle physics again.

With a bit of practice, you'll soon be able to calculate how much energy it takes to boil the world's oceans, compare road traffic accidents statistics worldwide and plot your choice of earthquakes and hurricanes - complete with official and academic sources."

i do not if wolframalpha is a google killer or not but one thing i am very sure-Its definitly a Homework Annihilator!! but then again as everybody pointed out its not so user friendly. there are a couple of thing to keep in mind when searching. but wtf even google has some guidelines on how to effectlively search in google!!  whatever the tech guru's say or dont say. wolframalpha gets a 5 from me!!