Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge search engine developed by the British-born physicist and Mathematica creator Stephen Wolfram, just went live about a week ago. While the search engine may provide “bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people,” what if you are not quite ready to give up on Google Search? For those if you using the Mozilla developed Firefox browser, there is an option to blend the two search engines, Wolfram Alpha and Google, thanks to an add-on called “Wolfram Alpha Google.”

The official description of the add-on: “Wolfram Alpha has just been released and everybody wants to compare it to Google. So I put together this mashup. Just do a search on Google and the Wolfram Alpha result for that search will appear on the right side. Take a look at the screenshots and you'll understand how it works.” A few of the screenshots mentioned in the description can be viewed at the bottom of this article.

There really isn’t much to say about this Firefox add-on; you enter a search query and you are provided with results from Google, and from Wolfram Alpha. The only downside is that sometimes, the list of Wolfram Alpha results is clipped off at the bottom, unless you have set up Google to display 20 or more results per page. You could also argue that because the Wolfram Alpha Google add-on is an experimental one, this is another downside. But the thing is that we haven’t had any issues with it, nor have we seen any online reports about it not working properly.

If you would like to get Firefox 3.0.10, the latest stable version of the browser, a download location is available here.
If you would like to get the Wolfram Alpha Google add-on, a download location is available here.