Comments on: Wolfram Alpha shows data in a way Google can't

CNET News editor Rafe Needleman and reporter Stephen Shankland discuss their ups and downs with the search engine that computes.

[tipoo_]

Looks extremely promising, i already have the page in my bookmarks so i don't forget about it when it launches :-)

[Jonathan Tappan]

"an iron to be wrinkled out"? That's a bizarre image!

[Shankland]

Evidently I have cliche dyslexia. Thanks!

[CrimsonCantab]

Alpha seems just like Mathematica. Really powerful, but really tedious.

[Shankland]

If you use Mathematica, Alpha will be familiar. If you don't, Alpha will be more surprising.

[coachgeorge]

I have been reading and hearing about WA for over 6 months now.
Lets get on with it.

[monkeyfun14]

Name seems difficult to remember =S

[carsjam]

Just google "search tools" ;-)

[mdsudan]

I can see huge commercial application in Enterprise data if the application is sold as an appliance similar to Google Search.
IBM's recent developments on Business Analytics have been around the same tone, this could be a very good tool to dissect data.

[biffhenerson]

Why are you comparing it to Google? Why do you feel that should it have been a Google product or that it is a threat to Google in any way? Seems kind of odd to me. It is cool. Very cool. Microsoft will buy him out. LOL!

[Myshkin57]

"Alpha handles numeric data well, but loosey-goosey stuff like art or philosophy is tough."

Good philosophy is not loosey-goosey at all. The unfortunately popularized notion of philosophy is that of a loosey-goosey pseudo-discipline. That's not what it is, at least not as done by those of us in the Analytic tradition. We owe almost all of the foundational work done setting out the logical structure of computers too philosophers who were interested in other phenomena long before there were any computers.

[Shankland]

I'm not trying to dis philosophy. I'm just saying a lot of it isn't really computable, just like history and art. Sure, you can get some historical data out of Alpha and maybe in some future version you'll be able to statistically analyze Picasso's color palette over the course of his life, but that misses a lot of the point of art. A lot of it may be rigorous and influential, but it isn't necessarily something you can process on a computer. There's some definitional material in the system--molecular weight of oxygen, stars who played in a movie--but that's the kind of thing that at least today Google and Wikipedia do reasonably well at. I'm particularly interested in the processing element of Alpha. Maybe someday you'll be able to ask it to compare Hegel with Wittgenstein, but for now at least that kind of deep knowledge is beyond Alpha.

[ConnorJ13]

This looks cool, I just have a problem with the name, it's kinda hard to remember and it seems a little weird.

[Shankland]

A lot of people don't like the name. I do, except for the confusion about alpha and beta versions of products. Maybe the trademark search in the computing industry was easier because of that. :)

[Pon666]

The Wolfram Alpha should not be compared with google. It does not aim to be a google, but rather a specific, scientific search engine for ( can't get a better word) geeks and scientists. And it does look promising.

[hardaway]

This is one of the most useful CNET posts I've ever read, and I've been reading since the beginning. I have a good idea now of what the service can and can't do, and who it is for. Still, I can't wait to try it.
Since all your dads have PhDs, I'll confess I have one, too. It's in English. Now where am I with Wolfram Alpha?

[minghua_huang]

??Wolfram Alpha??
http://www.WolframAlphacn.cn

[minghua_huang]

Wolfram Alpha news
http://www.WolframAlphacn.cn

[adamqkane]

If you're not up for installing the add-on, or don't use Firefox, here's a site I made which does side-by-side Google + Wolfram search results: http://www.googfram.com