## Monday, October 08, 2012 ... /////

### Symbolab: search engine for equations in LaTeX

Google is the dominator when it comes to general searches. Wolfram Alpha is an intelligent calculator of answers to your questions.

There's a new concept on the market. It's called:

Symbolab.com (click)
You may actually write an equation and/or text and it will try to find pages with equations that are logically relevant for your query.

I haven't been able to write a query that would produce a nontrivial result i.e. a hard-to-find page or paper that I couldn't easily locate with the text-based Google search engine. But if you manage to construct such an example, I will be very happy to learn about it.

At any rate, I am immensely impressed at least by the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) equation editor that is a part of the website. It would be nice if Blogger.com allowed me to incorporate a similar editor, so that the maths would constantly get translated to MathJax.

See a fresh interview with the father of this engine at TheNextWeb.com.

#### snail feedback (5) :

This reminds me of a pet peeve of mine. Often when I google something scientific, the links that are returned are to material that is not publicly available. Often the material is contained in journals that you would need a subscription to see. I can see that this would be nice if you were at a major university with access to many journals, but if you are not it's just annoying. I wish there were an option to remove these links.

Based on a few trivial tests, I see that maybe it does a good job of being variable-name-independent. If so, that's great! If I'm not mistaken, Google doesn't have this feature at all, even when the math (on the web, not in the search argument) is in text, and this has been annoying me for years.