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As if I needed another reason to spend too much time on the Internet, I have come across Addictomatic. This is search on steroids. I did a review recently on Search3.com. Search3 lets you search, from their website, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter and Ebay in one shot. Addictomatic is the site Search3 wishes it was. I’m having trouble finding a definitive list of where Addictomatic pulls information from. It’s almost overwhelming. So far, I see results from Google, Bing, Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Twingly, WordPress, Technorati, Bloglines, Wikio and more. Simple to use. Enter a topic, click create, and be overwhelmed.
Addictomatic crawls the web in search of the terms you’re interested in. The amount of results is pretty impressive. The layout, on top of being clean, is customizable. You can drag your favorite sites for a term to the top of the page, then bookmark it, and come back again and again to get new results. One draw back is that there’s nothing to suggest that the results are 100% relevant. It seems to just look for the terms you input and give you any page with those terms. But really, it doesn’t get better than this. Addictomatic earned instant bookmark for me. Go on. “Inhale the web.” You’re sure to like this site.
When it comes to Wolfram|Alpha, let me just start by saying, stop reading anything that wants you to believe Wolfram|Alpha is a search engine or is “close to being” a search engine, because it’s not. Wolfram|Alpha is a computational engine. It does not provide “search results.” It provides “data.” It is not a link between you and a website relevant to your interests. Wolfram|Alpha is more of an encyclopedic-super-calculator-data-aggregator/comparison-information-machine. And that’s really just scratching the surface of Wolfram|Alpha‘s capabilities.
I want to start “small” with what Wolfram|Alpha can accomplish. It’s actually taken me a bit to really understand the power this site has, and all of the tech articles out there passing it off as “The Google Killer That Couldn’t,” didn’t help in the least. Mathematics is going to be the most common aspect of the site that is used and mentioned. Enter in any simple equation–(2+2)4 for example–and Wolfram|Alpha will provide the answer, nice and sweet. Now, throw in something a little more exciting: x^2 sin(x). Wolfram|Alpha chose this particular input/result with good reason, that being, it shows off. From plots, to roots, to alternative representation, Wolfram|Alpha gives you all the possible data related to the input.
Moving on from equations, let’s talk historical data. Try December 7, 1988, in Philadelphia. The first information given is about the date, specifically. How long ago was the date? What day in the year was it? Which week in the year? Then, it moves on to the city on that date, giving the temperature throughout the day, including high, low, and average, cloud cover, time of sunrise and sunset, and moon phase. Finishing it off, Wolfram|Alpha provides data strictly about the city/area, such as the city center elevation and population at the time of the closest census. I think first of story writers. Not all writers want to be factual about small details, such as the weather or when the sun rose, but for those that do, this is perfect.
The informational scope that Wolfram|Alpha encompasses is incredible. Maybe you’re into buying and selling stocks. Type in a few stock symbols, and Wolfram|Alpha will give you side-by-side comparison. Maybe you’re a musician, looking to find scales. Or maybe you’re just into music and want to know who wrote that song and when it came out and how high on the charts it got. Into astronomy (or working on a school paper?) Find the position of nearly any celestial body at any date, or find specific details, such as mass and orbital period, about them.
On a diet? Figuring out a mortgage? Play the lottery? Are you a physicist? Interested in political figures? There are piles upon piles of uses for this site. Wolfram|Alpha‘s about page says it “contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains.”
Overall: Even if you think you’re never going to use Wolfram|Alpha, stop reading this blog right now, and head to WolframAlpha.com/examples/ and look around at just some of what the engine is capable of computing. This is the website I wish I had when I was in grade school using Microsoft Encarta for research, and it most definitely gets play with my current studies.
TechTimmy 
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