Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. Perhaps it will one day become one, but currently it's exactly what its tagline says: a computational knowledge engine. However, it looks like Google, it provides you with answers and therefore most users will try to use it as a search engine, which doesn't always yield good results. Once you start asking it the right questions, it'll give you better answers.

I've spent a couple of days with Wolfram Alpha, and I've learned to love it for all the ways it's different than search engines such as Google. Here are some guidelines which will help you shake off that "search engine" frame of mind and perhaps help you start using Wolfram Alpha to its full potential.

Complex queries

When you type a search query into Google, it understands what you want because the query is usually simple. If you give it a lot of data, it'll get confused. Google searches, it doesn't compute; and this is where Wolfram Alpha shines. It does not care at all how many arguments you give it; just like a calculator, it couldn't care less if you're adding up two or fifty numbers. That's why concatenating many arguments in a query often works extremely well.

Here's an example. If you want to find out detailed info on a planet in the solar system, in Google you'll get the best results by entering one planet at a time: Earth, Saturn, Jupiter, and so on. In Wolfram Alpha, you can simply put all of them in one query and you'll get both the data for every individual planet and several comparisons between them. You can go crazy; add stars, moons, nebulae into the mix; as long as the data is comparable, Wolfram Alpha will be able to give you a nice head-to-head comparison of all the entities you've fed it.

Localization

Google can create localized versions of its services, or even feed you different results depending on where you're physically located. However, it cannot force every site out there to do the same. Wolfram Alpha, for the most part, does not depend on other sites for the data it's giving you, and therefore its localization works better. For example, if I ask it "New York income per capita" it will also give me the result in my local currency. Google will give me good results for the same query, but I'll have to do the conversion myself.

Precision

The first query most reviewers tried on Wolfram Alpha was typing their own name into it, and they've gotten lousy results. Well, that's a good thing. Since you're probably not in WA's database, it does not try to pull the result from thin air; it simply says it has no information on you. This makes Google vastly better for actually searching the web; but it also gives a certain advantage to Wolfram Alpha: it's precise. You don't have to worry about getting the wrong information; you can rely on Wolfram Alpha to either give you the right answer (depending, of course, on the accuracy of its own index), or no answer at all.

This can have important implications on the way we conduct searches. We're used to approximate results, and thus we often try to round up numbers to get a better chance of finding an answer. On Wolfram Alpha, you can type in very precise queries, which can ultimately save you a lot of time.

Calculation

Well, duh. It is a computational engine, it's supposed to calculate well, right? It does seem obvious, but it's important to understand what this means from a practical standpoint. Not many users will type in complex mathematical formulas, but a lot of users need to know how much calories should they take daily, how to calculate their mortgage, and what's the distance between two cities. One way to think of Wolfram Alpha is as if someone collected all those various calculators scattered around the web and put them in one place. Google has been dabbling with this, adding currency conversion and other simple calculations to its search service, but WA is so vastly better than Google with this regard that you'll actually use it in your everyday life. And that means you won't have to visit obscure sites, usually designed in the last century, to find out what your body mass index is.

Comparison

The Google frame of mind - or, shall we put it, the search engine frame of mind - forbids you to ask certain queries, because you know you will not get an answer. You probably wouldn't even try to find a comparison of sales tax rates for five US cities, but on Wolfram Alpha it works like a charm.

Furthermore, when you need a comparison between two numbers or two data sets, you can only hope that Google has indexed a site that has exactly what you need; or you can do the comparing yourself. Not the case with WA, as you can easily compare several data samples and get not only results, but also handy graphs, ratios, tables and historical data comparisons.

Have you found a great way to use Wolfram Alpha? Please let us know in the comments!

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