12 surprising things that Wolfram Alpha knows

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Last May I wrote a blog post entitled “9½ things Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know”. It was meant primarily as a bit of fun, but I had a serious point. A few months earlier, Wolfram Alpha had been announced amid a tremendous buzz of excitement and expectation. With its new computational approach, it had seemed it might even usurp Google as the default gateway to online knowledge.

But when the service went live, it became apparent that Wolfram Alpha was a specialist tool for scientists. Though ingenious, it was all but useless if you just wanted everyday information about everyday topics.

Now, nine months later, the fuss has died down and Wolfram Alpha has settled into its scientific niche. It hasn’t acquired a database of Eurovision winners or CPU die sizes, and that’s fair enough. But while tinkering with it myself recently I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the things that Wolfram Alpha does turn out to know. To be fair, I’ve seen occasional reports of Wolfram Alpha “Easter eggs” in the past; but the examples below are all responses I’ve recently found through my own experimentation. And I’m certain there are many more gems just waiting to be discovered… (more…)

Could Bing be the search engine that kills Google?

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Once upon a time, when Google could declare “We’re not evil” without hundreds of thousands of shareholders to worry about, search engines were just search engines. Now, it appears, they’re not. Microsoft is calling Bing a decision engine, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and Yahoo is… well, let’s not go there.

You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search – Google kept on winning. (more…)

The people vs Wolfram Alpha

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Since Wolfram Alpha launched at the weekend, I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in which the author asks it inane questions and laughs when it falls flat. Even our own Darien Graham-Smith (along with several others in the office) seems almost delighted to prod and poke at it to find instances where Wolfram’s big pre-launch claims can be mocked – usually by comparison to Google or Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, this is something that was bound to happen given the publicity the site has received in recent weeks from the mainstream press. The big problem occurs because most people are attempting to hastily test the new engine without any real reason to be using it. (more…)

9½ things Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know

Monday, May 18th, 2009

So, after months of anticipation, Wolfram Alpha is finally here. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it a big disappointment.

I mean, obviously it was never going to slay Google on its first day. But after watching Stephen Wolfram’s pre-launch screencast I did believe it was at least going to be a credible alternative information source, offering authoritative and structured answers in a way no traditional search engine could aspire to.

Sadly, now Wolfram Alpha’s here it turns out that it doesn’t bloody know anything.

(more…)