A new Wolfram Alpha search engine that delivers factual answers to online queries instead of links to Web pages won top honors late Sunday at the South By South West (SXSW) awards ceremony. Wolfram Alpha was crowned “Best of Show” at the annual Web Awards that featured categories ranging from blogs, business and classic online services to mobile, game, and film innovations on the Internet. Like online mapping services, Wolfram Alpha provides factual answers to online queries. For example, Wolfram Alpha could tell a searcher how old a historical figure or celebrity was when they died or solve mathematical problems. The curated answer engine uses mathematical formulas to scour the Internet for information and natural language recognition technology to figure what queries are aimed at finding out. Wolfram Alpha recently announced a deal to provide factual answers to relevant queries at Microsoft's Bing search engine.
