Wolfram|Alpha - an Atomic look

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Wolfram|Alpha's flaws

If you're after anything in particular from Wolfram|Alpha, you can find some basic information about it with the search engine, but we found it nowhere near a replacement for Google. In fact we'd be wary of recommending it as a supplement to Google, as most of the information it returns is from Wikipedia anyway, simply reformatted and trimmed.

Speed was a problem during the testing as well, sometimes hanging and at times forcing a random ten second wait without warning. Our best guess is that it was due to having to check the sources it uses and hitting server lag there, on top of the Wolfram|Alpha servers already.

Even without these niggles, Google searches are at least transparent with any linkage to their search results - so long as you don't do anything illegal with it they're fine with you linking to any of their search results. Wolfram|Alpha is incredibly anal-retentive about this process, instead demanding that you reference and cite the service every single time you use the result

Groklaw had a delve into the terms of use, and found that they're even warning academic plagiarism and other copyright violations if you link incorrectly! Not only is the service a pain in the butt to use, but even using the results seem to be restricted once you've managed to get them.

Sure there's some nice computational features in the service, and it presents the information it returns in a nice and clear way, but it shouldn't feel like you have to convince the search engine to give you a result - unlike Google this was a problem we ran into annoyingly often.

Head to the next page for a conclusion, and a nifty little easter egg.

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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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