Knowledge at the Tip of Your "Fingers" By Adina

Have you ever sat under the warm sun and wondered how far away the sun is from the earth? Or have you ever wondered the lifespan of an owl? Wolfram Alpha has all your answers! Released on May 18, 2009, Wolfram Alpha was derived from Wolfram’s earlier work Mathematica. Rather than a search engine, it answers questions from a sourced curated data, which means that it gathers its data from a wide variety of academic and commercial websites. The website is also available through your mobile phone. You can purchase it through the app store or Google play.

            Entering the websites homepage you are greeted with a bright green display or orange or blue or gray. You have the option to change the color of the homepage as you please. Dead center is the text box with the company’s logo star and Wolfram alpha in red and orange. This is where you enter your questions or equations. Below the text box there are stickers that illuminate when passed over with a mouse. You can click on the images and it will pop up and tell you want that picture is.

Double click the same image and it will take you to a list of information about that certain picture. In the text box, there are buttons that help you with searches, such as an extended keyboard for special characters, an image input, a data input and a file upload. The text box also gives you the option to look at examples by topic from culture and media to socioeconomic data and if you’re feeling like you want to learn something new, you can click the random button which pulls up a random search from it’s data base. The only thing is that those certain features are only available to people that have subscribed to the pro version but what good is all this fun if the website limits your data.

            Once upon opening the extended keyboard I see that I only have 4 options to choice from, all the rest of characters are blocked off. The characters consist of pi, the degree symbol, infinity, the square root, Greek letters, arrows, and finally the female and male sex symbols. I don’t necessarily need to use the other characters but it would be nice to see what this website truly has to offer. After opening the entire side buttons, I see that I can’t access any of the extra features unless I subscribe to Wolfram Alpha Pro. Looking further into going pro, I see that a small monthly fee is required to “go pro.” As a student, I can acquire it for $3.75 for others the price raises to $5.49 a month. It’s a small price to pay for an entire network of data but as a college student I don’t want to pay for something I don’t need. I can search the distance from Earth to the sun (which is 91.59 million miles apart) and the lifespan of an owl (60 to 70 years) quite perfectly without a problem. Upon searching, the website lets you share the information you are looking at with anyone through an email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I can also share certain information from the results. It also gives me the opportunity to download the information, enlarge pictures, customize and save images, copy the plain text and enable the interactive portion of the data. But you already know that those features are for the pro subscribers. The website doesn’t always have an answer once you search for something more complex it gives you of no result. I understand that asking this answer engine a theoretical question will pull up no result because that’s a search engines job but if I want to know the price of rice in China it brings to a page that says no result. This makes me wonder what else is limited on this website.

            Wolfram Alpha also offers a calculate option. You type in your equation and it gives you everything to know about that certain equation but without Wolfram Alpha Pro I am confined to the simplified version of the information. If I were subscribed, I would get richer results with colored and customizable graphs.  I tried to see if this website could help me with my math homework but I was limited to the type of equation I could type in the text box. Anything more complex than an equation like y=mx+b was done and over with because the website doesn’t offer the option of a full mathematical keyboard, even if I subscribed. This website couldn’t help me with my homework but it can help me practice math. Wolfram Alpha has a new problem generator that lets you practice unlimited math problems and shows step-by-step solutions. There is a free trial you can use but once your trial is over once again if you don’t “go pro” than this feature isn’t available to you.

            Wolfram Alpha gives you the option to make a free account with them. With this you can favorite information and look back at your history. You can also set your visual preferences such as result width, font size, location, and history settings. You can also get a free interactive personal analytics report from your Facebook data with Wolfram Alpha. Once you have an account you have the option to make your own widgets and apps through Wolfram Alpha. It’s a great feature for developers and app designers but as an Anthropology major it have no use for it.

            I came to terms that this website could be of great use for college students. It’s a quick and easy way to find reliable information instead of searching through a library for the same data but honestly I rather scroll though 15 pages in Google or read an entire book than pay 45 dollars a year for something that I possibly only going to use to help me on one assignment. This website can’t answer questions that require a narrative answer but only fact-based questions. So, think twice when picking an engine to search from.