Dear readers, you might have heard about a new search engine called Wolfram Alpha in the recent past. There’s been a great amount of hype about it with its backers claiming to take web search to an entirely new level. So what do you have to say on that?
When I heard these claims for the first time, I rolled up my eyes and thought yet another contender for the throne that has been occupied by Google…. and another likely failure. Then a colleague showed me how it worked and I was to state simply, bowled over! I also realized how severely prejudices and uniformed opinion can restrict a person.
Google stays put where it was, yet Wolfram Alpha actually takes searching for information on the Internet to an entirely new level. It is an awesome tool if you need to compare information based on facts and figures. For example if you key in English and Spanish you will get a user-friendly table which has information about the place of origin, total number of speakers, writing systems and much more pertaining to the two languages!
Wolfram Alpha might appear to be useful to people who work in fields involving a lot of facts and figures. But on a closer look it can prove to be of great use to almost anyone, including those of us associated with the language translation industry. You have to play around with it, think about how it can be used, and surely you will be able to zero in on a number of valuable search strategies. And please don’t forget share them with yours truly. 
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2 Comments
hi
please, can you explain what you mean with “use WA for translations”? can you link a “translating search”? I cannot reproduce it, the best thing I can do (and it’s a _great_ thing, huh) is some integral calculus
WA doesn’t know what to do with most of my search terms. I guess i have to stick with search engines like google, find.com, yahoo, etc.