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25 June 2009
Wolfram Alpha Google Plugin for Firefox
If you hurry, you might be among the first 65,000 people to download a new Wolfram Alpha Firefox plugin, designed to show results from the 'answer engine' alongside those of Google.
There's a nice logic to the idea. You get the all the advantages of the powerful Google search, with the niche information from Wolfram Alpha displayed as a toggle on the right-hand side.
For example, if you search for the term 'digital', Wolfram Alpha gives you definitions of the word, statistics on how often it is written or spoken, and how it is pronounced by Americans. It's a bit like half-listening to a pub quiz champion while you get on with finding whatever it was you were looking for.
On the minus side, the additional information soon gets distracting, and many searches result in blanks for Wolfram Alpha. The plugin is also painfully slow to load information.
Google is unlikely to be pleased when it realises the results knock PPC advertisers off the page, but for a different slant to search it's certainly worth trying out - and certainly a nice niche for smaller search engines to exploit.
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