Wolfram, Twitter or Google?

I’ve been playing around with Wolfram, the new computational search engine that’s getting a lot of hype on Twitter and from the established Media.

As Cellan-Jones’ piece on Radio 4 highlighted, there are a lot of things that it does badly. Even if it does know that 88mph means the speed that Marty McFly’s Delorian will go Back To The Future.

But there are other search engines, Google aside, that are really getting my interest. Twitter primarily.

Yesterday saw Charlie Brooker write a piece on the BNP election video. An awful piece of editing and dogma, the BNP stands for British values – yes of course they do, they just happen to be a subset of the British population – read the article, very poignant. And the comments are too, and I particularly loved Kimpatsu’s retort to someone’s suggestion that the BNP aren’t bad and people are tribal:

“@XML5000: We’re also primed to eat, but I can deny myself high-glucose and fried foods by willpower. We are not the sum of our genes; we can rise above it to be more noble. If you really want to be tribal on a genetic level, you should be directly related to everyone you call your tribe. (Kinship altruism.) That you now regard your tribe as a whole island of people shows that the notion can be hijacked to larger groups. Next group: the whole world is my tribe, for I judge people not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.
I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere before…”

But, naturally, I wanted to see just how bad this video was and either cower in fear or laugh out loud. And the result was both. But… I couldn’t find it. Not via Google. Not via YouTube’s search engine. But I could via Twitter.

It only works as a zeitgeist search, and only when you have a few extra seconds, but if that’s what you need and have it works brilliantly.