Search engines

In the past month, a few more search engines have come online, and Google has a new toy as well. WolframAlpha and Microsoft's Bing are new ones on the scene, and Google Labs is working on something called Google Squared.

Now, it's worth noting that these are not equivalent. WolframAlpha is a "Computational Knowledge Engine." What does this mean, exactly? Well, it depends on what you're asking it. If it's something it knows about, it'll tell you all sorts of information. It has a lot of data in various scientific fields -- sociology, physics, chemistry, computer science, and of course math. It does well on integrals etc, when posed in a suitable way. It does slightly better on physical constants. For example, giving google:

(electron charge)^2 / (bohr radius * electron mass)

makes it very sad, since it doesn't know what a Bohr radius is. Wolfram seems to have done a good job with the physical constants, and it does a nice job of comparing units. For example,

coulomb constant * (electron charge)^2/ (bohr radius)

will tell me that it is an energy, and give the answer in joules, therms, electronvolts, BTUs, hartrees, rydbergs, and for some reason watts per hertz.
Aside from math, it'll tell you things like the top visited websites, the average death rate due to herpes per country, a list of US presidents, etc.

Note that I haven't included Bing in the above science-y stuff. That's because it doesn't do anything like that. It searches the web, and limits itself to that. Google's search results look very similar to Bing's, and it's mainly an interface difference. What I like about Bing is the ability to preview the website it found for you, right within Bing. It shows a small excerpt when you mouse-over the right side of the result. Whether this is useful or not depends on the site. It's not all that useful when searching for restaurants, which isn't Bing's fault, but that of the websites it returns.

Finally, there's Google Squared, which is hidden in the Google Labs section. It is similar to Wolfram Alpha in that it tries to compile your search results into a table with relevant data. Sometimes this is great, but most of the time it's limited by the website return.

Finally, for some fun, note that Bing spells "But It's Not Google"
When you're done playing with Wolfram Alpha's examples, ask it if it's Skynet.