Searching Options Galore

Last week, I wrote about the hot new search engine – or rather, a “computational knowledge engine” – called Wolfram|Alpha.

I Twittered about it, just to inform my “followers” that I’m doing some research on it and a few of them started to look into it.

So far, the initial feedback and reviews from my more web-savvy friends are quite positive. As mentioned in my column last week, Wolfram|Alpha still has many limitations. It’s far from a finished product and will probably be a work in progress for years to come.

But even in its nascent state, it’s an impressive tool. Yes, we already have Google, which does a damn good job of searching the Web for information. But Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t search the Web in a conventional sense.

It gathers information from all kinds of sources, online and offline, and compiles them into databases. It then uses such information to provide answers for natural language search questions.

The company’s goals are ambitious:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

For examples of the kind of searches Wolfram|Alpha is good for, please have a look at last week’s column. Or better still, go to www.wolframalpha.com and test it out for yourself.

Meanwhile, Google is not standing still. If you look carefully at Google’s search results, you’ll find that there are some new and interesting options available. To get a overview of these options, visit this link: http://tinyurl.com/q6x8cs (it leads to a YouTube video).

Now, I will tell you about two of them that I find particularly intriguing and possible useful: Timeline and Wonder wheel. And the best way to illustrate them to you is to use examples.

The first option is “Timeline”. For this, I will search for “Tom Hanks”. To find a timeline for this, just enter the keywords “Tom Hanks” into Google and when you get the results, look right underneath the Google logo for the “Show Options” link.

Click on that link and on the left hand side, you will see a few core options: All results, Any time, Standard results and Standard view. Under Standard view, there are two links. Click on Timeline and you will see a timeline of Tom Hanks, starting with 1935. No, that’s not when he was born but the era which his movie The Green Mile was set in. Then it jumps to 1956, which is the year he was born. And so on.

Next, to illustrate Wonder wheel option, I will use “Angels and Demons”, Hanks’s latest movie. What it does is create a cluster diagram based on the search results for those keywords. It shows the social relationship between the various nodes and the movie (or book), “Angels and Demons”.

All the nodes are clickable and by exploring them, you get to see clearly the relationship they have to the main subject of your search. It is a way to give you a broad overview of topics you are interested in as well as topics related to them.