A week after the launch, Wolfram Alpha has announced it will soon pass 100 million queries. One reason for this is the fact that this new search engines doesn’t deliver search results like Google, Yahoo and the rest — it solves problems.

Wolfram Alpha isn’t a search engine, it’s a fact engine. It will never compete with Google for navigational queries, news search, blog search, video search or image search. But it might steal a lot of traffic on fact queries.

Wolfram Alpha’s goal is:

[T]o make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. (…) 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.

All this, of course, goes on behind the scene. The only tool you need to compute the data and solve your fact related problems is the search box.

Here are 10 ways to let Wolfram Alpha solve your problems. These 5 examples will also teach you a lot about how Wolfram Alpha works and how you can use it.

1. Plan ahead

Planning ahead is easier with Wolfram Alpha. Let’s say you are planning a big party for your husband’s 50th birthday on March 30 2010. The first thing you do is to search for March 30 2010 and discover it’s a Tuesday.

You want the party to be on a Saturday and decide to go for April 3. Then you remember Easter often comes in April, so you search for Easter 2010. This way you find out that Easter Sunday is April 4 and you decide to have the party the Saturday before, March 27. Wolfram Alpha tells you that is 304 days from now. Plenty of time to plan a great party.

2. Get your vitamins

You want to make sure you get the proper dose of vitamins, so you search for DRI Vitamin C. You find out that the daily recommended intake is 70 milligrams.

You had strawberries for breakfast, so you enter 0.3 pounds of strawberries and learn that you are home free.

3. Plan your workout

You want to go running. For motivation, you would like to know how many calories you are likely to burn. You enter running 30min, 6min/mi, 28yo female, 5′6″, 135lb in the search box and learn that you are likely to burn 525 calories. (30 min, 6min/km, 28yo female, 1.60m, 60kg works as well).

Before you go, you want to know what you should wear. So you type weather forecast paris (going for a run along the Seine, you lucky dog…).

4. Solve a crossword puzzle

You are solving a crossword pussle and you are almost done. You are just two words short. The first word has 10 characters and ends in …ager. The clue is “judge”. You search for words ending in ager and among the results is the word arbitrager.

Just one more word to go. The clue is “compute” and you already have these letters: _al_ _la_ _. Wolfram Alpha discovers the words balaclava, calculate and saleslady.

5. Bistromatics

You and your friends are in a restaurant and have had more than a little wine with your meal. So when the check arrives, you can’t figure out how much to tip. You enter EUR250 + 15% (You’re still in Paris…) and find out that the total is 287.50 euros.

The 5 of you split the bill and your each owe 57.50. This seems like a lot of money to you, and you want to know how much that is in your corrency, dollars. In the search box you enter eur57.50 in dollars and the result is 80 dollars and 14 cents. Sure, that’s a lot of money, but it is a reasonable price for a fine dinner in Paris.

A problem not yet solved

Unfortunately Wolfram Alpha does not understand the query “Daily Recommended Intake Vitamin C”. You have to know the DRI abbreviation to make this query work.

At other times the engine does manage to interpret natural language queries. You may for instance write “28 years old” instead of 28yo. Still, this all means that there may be a very steep learning curve for many types of queries.

There is a list of examples – and you may study those — but I am not sure how many users have the patience for that kind of schooling. All this means that the Wolfram Alpha crew should put much more effort into studying how people formulate queries, and — if in doubt — give searchers more alternative “did you mean?” interpretations of their questions.

photo credit: Kevin Lawver