There’s a lot to be said for geeks. They tend to know things. And sometimes things need to be known. Like if you’re trying to impress a particularly intellectual boss (or particularly gorgeous, and intellectual of course, date) with your knowledge of, say, the state of the South African economy. As you do.

Of course, there’s always a pre-meeting/date Google to be done. But sometimes Google is just not, well, nerdy enough. We’re talking stats, facts and figures at a glance here. No wading through scrolls and scrolls of questionable Wikipedia facts or pages and pages of completely unrelated rubbish (read porn – yes, it even sometimes comes up when you type in ‘economy’… Really, it happens.) Which is where Wolfram Alpha comes in.

Wolfram Alpha has been hailed as a “computational knowledge engine” by British founder Stephen Wolfram (possibly a geek himself?), which in normal person speak means it’s an answer-engine that uses an actual “curated knowledge base of data” (okay, that’s kinda nerdy speak but you know what we mean) – more than 10 trillion pieces of data and over 50 000 algorithms – rather than rounding up websites based on keywords, to give you answers.

In every day terms, Wolfram Alpha is good for when you’re looking for statistical facts like population sizes, country stats, mathematical equations, historical dates and other, erm, clever stuff, but when it comes to the stuff we usually tend to Google – like whizzy new design ideas and your ex’s name – it’s not the best.

Anyway, potayto, potarto, Google, Wolfram… you don’t have to choose here. You can use Google and Wolfram at the same time (gasp) and all on the same search page, thanks to a Firefox extension that allows Wolfram to search at the same time as your Google search. Wolfram Alpha results, which take a little bit longer to come up, are pasted JavaScript-style into the right-hand side of your Google search results page. To download it, you can just go here or download it direct on the Wolfram downloads page.

Have to admit we quite like this Wolf-thing. And it’s not quite so geeky when you add a wolf howl every time you say it.

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