How in the Tech

Add Wolfram Alpha to Firefox Search Box

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 19, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

A few days ago Wolfram|Alpha was finally unveiled to the public in the form of a functional alpha product. At first glance Wolfram Alpha appears to be just another ambitious search engine trying to gain traction from the behemoth Google. However, it becomes immediately clear upon your first search that the product isn’t a search engine at all and therefor isn’t competing with Google – they have two very different uses. Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine from Wolfram Research Company, the company behind the powerful Mathematica software familiar to most Engineers.

Wolfram Alpha differentiates itself from a traditional search engines in that submitted computational and factual questions are analyzed, process, and then finally answered. For example, if you were interested in the mortality rate of the United States the search results from Google will return a series of pages that ideally answer that question – but at best it will take a bit of further reading of the returned sites. With Wolfram, the question is answered quite quickly – about 2.5 million per year. The example is simple but it helps illustrate that Google can only answer questions that have already been posed, while Wolfram can analyze a set of data (websites perhaps), understand what exactly it is processing, interpret your question, and then answer your question based on all it’s known and available information. There is a bit of a learning curve to formulate your questions correctly but in the end, it’s a pretty impressive and mind blowing achievement which looks to only have scratched the service of all the possibilities.

Even though Wolfram Alpha is not a general purpose search engine you may be interested in adding it as an option do your embedded Firefox Search box – typically to the right of the AwesomeBar. The Clickable Resources website has created a Firefox search plug-in to do just that.

Check it out – meanwhile I’m going to get back to exploring this amazing alpha release!