Wolfram|Alpha - an Atomic look

We've spent a little time with Wolfram|Alpha's computational search engine, but what we found wasn't quite what was expected.

Everybody on this big green/blue globe who uses the Internet has heard of Google; the most popular search engine for finding information, news and much more.

There are of course competitors to Google's reign, the very latest being Wolfram|Alpha, but it isn't your typical search engine at all.

Developed by and named after Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram|Alpha is intended to be a computational knowledge engine - but what exactly is that?

As it says on the site itself, it's a great concept:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

Claiming to be able to compute or retrieve any statistical and numeric information about any topic, it seems to be not just a great idea but an invaluable tool - after all, who wouldn't like an easily searchable engine of all human knowledge?

The downside to this is that it never really seems to live up to the claims of the developers, and while this isn't surprising (a gerat many technologies never quite hit the mark) it is very disappointing, but first we'll go through some of the reasons why it does and doesn't bring warmth to our nerdy hearts.

We set about using the service since its inception last week, so click on to find out what we found.

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11 Comments

sirsquidness May 21, 2009 12:25 PM	I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. It was never meant to be a Google replacement. They do completely different things. Thus, not being a google replacement is not something to give it a thumbs down over. Google is designed to find relevant pages. WA calculates stuff. Putting in "CPU" in to WA leaves it nothing to compute. Perhaps a list of acronym expansions or a dictionary definition would be useful. But try the following on google or any other search enging, and you'll see why Wolfram alpha is actually a fantastic site. "Holman". It's my last name. I search for it on google, very little useful stuff comes up. Some US dude with a PHD. etc. I put it in [url=http://www30.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=holman]WA[/url] and BAM. Look at those lovely statistics! Or say I'm stuck with maths. [url=http://www30.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate+2(sqrt(1%2F4-x^2))]BAM.[/url]. WA pulls up graphs, steps in how to calculate it (if you click the show steps button), series expansions and alternate forms (and more, depending on what you're doing). Put in a city. You're just curious about something. [url=http://www30.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sydney]Sydney's current temp is roughly 19C, 56% relative humidty, 10m/s wind and mildly overcast.[/url]. I bet Google can't do that. As they say, it's aim is to be able to compute anything that's systematically computable. Acronyms and static values (such as pi) aren't really anything computable. It may be a bit slow at the moment, but keep in mind it's only in alpha, and they'll still be experiencing the initial wave of users (at least you don't get the "Server load exceeded" messages from HAL most of the time, now). WA really is a fantastic invention, and really shouldn't be compared to any other typical search engine.
Hawkeye May 21, 2009 12:33 PM	Sadly, WA has not idea what to do with my surname. sadfayce
TheFrunj May 21, 2009 12:34 PM	I mentioned that it was fantastic (not using the same word, mind) for the uses it was intended for, just not for everyone under the sun :) For specific purposes it's the best thing since self-slicing bread. -JR
daleyboy79 May 21, 2009 1:37 PM	It cant tell me the colour of a 2 cent piece :(
Athiril May 21, 2009 2:14 PM	Ask it what the meaning of life is and you get 42 ;O
sirsquidness May 21, 2009 4:19 PM	Hawkeye: And it thinks my home town suddenly had 20,000 people killed. (Quite old data, I believe) It doesn't yet know everything. But it's working on it. (Just wait until it comes to know everything about your family, Hawkeye. Just you wait... but atleast then you'll be able to search for it on there =D )
Hawkeye May 21, 2009 5:11 PM	Great. Skynet's about to learn where my fracking family lives. Great.
drago13666 May 21, 2009 8:40 PM	Challenge, without the aid of a calculater, use one search to find which is better value, a 7 oz bottle of purfume for $80 US, or a 120ml bottle for $70 AUD. Google cant do that. With W\|A all you need is "80 US$ per 7 floz to A$ per ml" What about finding how much AU it would cost for ten metres of cable when you are buying it from an English wholesaler in increments of 5 feet. Can google tell me that? 10 US$ per 40 feet to A$ per meter
AIMBOT May 22, 2009 9:28 AM	Having used Mathematica for work, W\|A feels like a simple Mathematica web interface with a different set of features that it gains from being web based.
Sorceror May 22, 2009 1:18 PM	I agree with sirsquidness, this review entirely misses the point of what Wolfram Alpha is for. It's a computation engine, just browse through all the example computations you can do. Think about it as Google's built-in calculator, but on steroids. I'd also like to point out that they manually curate all the data they put into it, so while some data might be sourced from Wikipedia, it's not scraped automatically and does get checked over to some extent.
smadge1 May 22, 2009 2:05 PM	it won't tell me how many giraffes are kept in zoos or in captivity. I don't see the point of it really. It does show some nice network diagrams when searching for two types of animals.

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