Whilst we do (and seemingly always will) see Google as our first choice search engine, in the past couple of months we have come to enjoy Wolfram Alpha’s computational search. The two are different yet comparable – whilst Google focuses on results most relevant to your keywords, Wolfram computes an answer to your query based on its own database of knowledge.

So, sometimes you’ll find yourself wanting to use both. For example, if you wanted to know something as specific as the current population of China, Google will give you plenty of sites and pages with information pertaining to the answers, but Wolfram Alpha gives you the data straight away, and as many statistics as it deems relevant (such as population density, average age, life expectancy etc.). Of course, Wolfram is less useful if you’re after something less specific, or something that couldn’t be in its knowledge base, for example if you typed “SEO company Brighton”, Wolfram Alpha can’t help. Yet.

In a way, the difference between the two is as marked as the difference between intelligence and knowledge. Google (the intelligent search) adopts complex algorithmic searches that take myriad factors into consideration before presenting you with what it perceives to be the most relevant results. Wolfram Alpha (the knowledgeable search) parses your keywords and relates them to its own accumulation of facts and figures, and presents the relevant data in both textual and graphical formats.

Between the two, you can usually find what you’re after (and plenty of irrelevant yet interesting material besides); and happily, some clever chap has combined the two into a two-column search mashup, unimaginatively titled Goofram. One query, two pages of results. Convenient.