Wishful Maths

It's been over a month that Stephen Wolfram's WolframAlpha has gone live; and I've been following the developments closely. It's greatness and awe-factor notwithstanding, I doubt I would have used it for anything else other than solving Maths. I did horribly bad in my CET Maths exams, and imagine how uber cool it would have been to have a tool that would solve something complex like integrate x^2 sin^3 x dx for me. :-P


For everything else, I believe dear ol' goog is better.

I mean, I tried to find the distance from Bangalore to Delhi, and it drew up a neat page with map and super-cool calculated values.



Only that, the values were far from reality. The results showed that it would take approximately 118 minutes by flight. A brief check on travel sites state that most flights take around 2 hours 40 mins from Bangalore to Delhi. That's not so bad, considering we probably don't have planes that fly at 550 mph. The driving time is given as 19.7 hours, which leads us to the fact that not all things in life can be equated using Maths. :-)

And as to the eternal question, I was mildly surprised that W|A did actually have a satisfactory answer.

social search: get questions answered by your friends through Aardvark

People think I am skewed towards Google a lot. Actually, am not! Google, is almost always, the second choice when I need information. The first I turn to, are most always people. If I am stuck with UI, I usually turn to Renjith; if it's python, then there is Vikalp; if it's machine learning, there's Srinivas to lend a helping hand; if it's about the latest in web technologies, or anything about good food joints in Bangalore, then there is always Arjun.

People, unlike Google, can give factual answers, and that allows me to complete my task fast and easy. I would rather go by what my friends have to say than what I find in some obscure website discovered through Google.

And then, there's always the trust factor, and of being approachable. Would you mind, if your friend (or a friend's friend) asks you a question about a topic you are knowledgeable about? Chances are, you would happily oblige!

And, it is for this reason, that I believe Aardvark is a cut above the rest.


Welcome the next generation in Social Search. It is somewhat related to web search, in the sense that you search the web to find information within them; whereas in Social Search you try and find people who are capable of giving you the information that you seek. Simply put, Social search is all about finding information from real people.

I have a few invites left. So, if any of you are interested in trying it out, then drop me a mail, and I will send you one.