5/18/2009

Tech Tip: New Search Engine - Wolfram Alhpa

There is a new computational search engine now up and running on the Internet called Wolframalpha. I dont know how useful it will be for appraisers, but it is an interesting site and when searched it can return much specific information including graphs and charts. You can enter dates and it gives general information, and you can also ask specific questions. Many will queries will compute and return usable and specific content. If, as an appraiser you are looking for some statistics, probabilities or numbers, along with the right question, the site could be useful.

The site is at http://www.wolframalpha.com/

From the Wolframalpha Site:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

I entered "appraisal" in the search box, and this is the return, as you can see the information returned is answer or query based as opposed to web site location based such as Google.