My dad just sent me a demo for jaw-dropping “computational knowledge engine,” Wolfram Alpha, which went live this past weekend. You put in a search term, which could be a mathematical formula, two cities, whatever, and it analyzes the term and its context and returns related statistics, plots a curve, gives you a map, shows mortalitiy rates, whatever! Off the hook!

The design reminds me of a suggested contextual search engine design from Tufte I remember reading somewhere…anybody remember?

Check the demo, it’s a must see.

Wolfram Alpha demo