two new ‘search engines’ that aren’t

Well they are not exactly search engines.. they are more atuned to the semantic or intelligent web. One has already launched and the other is in the launching beta process.

wolframThe first is Wolfram Alpha, whose name comes from its creator,  British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram who insists it is not a search engine but rather  “a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.” This engine is based on what he calls Mathematica and not on the semantic web.

He claims that Wolfram|Alpha’s aim is

“to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.  You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer”.

Here is where you can find out about Mathematica.

Naturally right now it is only available for English language searches and is not internationalized just yet.

imindiThe second is iMindi – which, according to its creators, “helps you collect your thoughts and share them with like minded people”.  Since it is still in beta, you need to register to try it and give your opinion.