When it comes to search engines you can’t get better than Google?  However, Wolfram Alpha may be poised to send shock waves through the digital world with a new take on the established search engine.

In recent years Google has dominated the digital world and replaced Microsoft as the technology super-power, but every reign has to come to an end. On May 09 2009 Wolfram Alpha is set to change the way we search the web with its natural language interface it seems that Stephen Wolfram’s creation could make searching the web more human.

It will be based on the same familiar Google single input field, but will work in a very different way.  It won’t just search its database for keywords it will compute the answers from questions asked in many different ways.  I won’t even begin to get into the science behind this, so here is an article from cnet.com that may help explain the ins and outs more clearly.

In short, Google will help you find the car, music or holiday you’ve been looking for, while Wolfram Alpha will give you facts about subjects in a more intuitive way than Google can at the moment.  Obviously Google will be watching Wolfram Alpha with interest, and I am sure they would love to own it which with their power shouldn’t be too much of an ask.

However this turns out, Wolfram’s search facility can only mean more options and clearer answers for the end user, while at the same time keeping Google on its toes which is no bad thing.  I wait with interest for May 09 and potentially the next digital revolution.

The lack of fonts available to web designers is a constant source of frustration.  Don’t panic though, just over the horizon is CSS font embedding, until then here is a simple solution to help keep your pages looking good while still keeping those search engine’s happy.

Firstly here is the CSS, I will explain in more detail later.

h1 {font: 18px  Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; width:200px, height:100px; background: url(nasariklogo.jpg);}
h1 span {display:none;}

And here is the HTML.

<h1><span>nasarik.com tutorials life technology</span></h1>

So here are the details, the h1 contains the background image that is to be displayed as well as the text style, the h1 span is requesting that nothing should display.  So all you need to do is reference your h1 in the body with your text inside, then to hide the text add the span, easy really.  There are variations on this theme, for instance instead of using display:none; you can use absolute positioning to move the text off the displaying document.

This would look like-

h1 span {position:absolute; left:-2000px;}

Both give the same effect, but I prefer the first option as it simplifies your code just that little bit.  There are however a number of alternatives which are covered on Web Designer Wall.  I am now waiting for CSS and web browsers to catch up so that we can start embedding our fonts.