Comments on: Wolfram Alpha is live; give us your impressions

New search engines don't come around every day; let us know what you think about your initial experiences with Wolfram Alpha in here.

[monkeyfun14]

I don't think Wolfram Alpha is exactly meant to compete with Google I think its a whole new breed of search.

[dekalbave121]

I agree wholeheartedly.

[mnl1121]

Agreed. Its not the same type of search engine. You search and get results instantly, no need to go through web pages.

[Drew.0]

Site is down :( Rough "launch" day. Good thing it's still in Alpha stages.

[Drew.0]

Loading now after long delay with slow searches. Kind of cool, but I sure hope they plan on returning TEXT results instead of images. That seems a bit strange...

[oli0157]

If you click on the image it comes up with copyable plaintext...

[Drew.0]

So you get an image of some text, with the title atr/src set to the text.. You then click the image of the text and a textarea pops up that has the text in it so you can click select and right click to copy it.. The overhead they've got from just giving me the population of a town seems extreme.. Images are great to make calculus familiar but they are EXTREMELY redundant for most cases and I'm sure that's helping add to the long delays Im getting during day 2-3

[macewan_]

wolframalpha.com Error: DataPacletFilter: Unable to get Connection Too many connections http://www.flickr.com/photos/macewan/3535322203/

[fayezsalka]

I tried the following searches and the results were:

Search : IBM Apple, result : IBM (IBM) | Apple (AAPL)
Search : September 11, 1992, result : Friday, September 11, 1992
Search : Apple VS Microsoft, result : Apple (AAPL) | Microsoft (MSFT)
Nothing more!!??
is that cause it has an overload?

[CrimsonCantab]

I was predicting that Wolfram wasn't ready for this level of scalability. I was right; my search just sat there waiting for several minutes until I closed the browser. Too much traffic.

[naucnauc]

x2...................

[vamman]

This is the search engine of the future.

[lonestarState]

I had no problems with Wolfram. Will definetly use Wolfram along side my custom made search from BuildaSearch.com

[jinx101a]

It was Ok... i don't know how to use it well yet clearly though.

[liquidmetalband]

I haven't been able to access it once. They're going to need to upgrade their servers. Or maybe, the problem is that the calculations can be too complex, so each query can take very long to complete.

[manojlds]

I either got that "dave" message or it just stopped with the "loading" symbol. When I did get the answer, it wasnt really the answer. It was as minimal as the one fayezsalka mentioned. I was really hoping that this one will be the next gen of search engines, but so far, it doesnt look good..Google killer? You gotta be kidding...

If only everything in the world can be reduced to a number.

[sharmajunior]

I think we may need to parse everything to an Int or a double....LOL

[SixVodkas]

Already been done. The answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42.

[Thotheros]

I forgot an typed 'The Meaning of Life' and got 42. Which I was hoping for. Must have been a common search among Adams lovers.

[oli0157]

try searching for:
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck.
It returns:
a woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
:)

[jefffjackson]

Wolfram is useless. Can someone please tell me why wolfram is better than Wikipedia?

[monkeyfun14]

Because wolfram makes calculations in real time and Wikipedia doesn't

[monkeyfun14]

You know something they could do to offload server load is figure out a way to have the calculations figured out client side but just feed the client data.

[ZetaZeta_]

That's like the complete opposite of Cloud services in general. ;P

[tm_anon]

Why not use a P2P type search engine using the computing power of millions of PCs all connected? The more people use it, the faster and better it would become.

Cloud services tend to be centralized, great for setting up thin clients and minimalizing power usage but for something on this scale, P2P is a better choice.

If you have up to several hundred PCs connecting, go for Cloud services. Several million PCs call for P2P.

[planetautomatic]

Wolfram Alpha is wierd.
I entered "Who's You Daddy?". It then told me "Sorry Dave.."
Polite Mf***r with backhanded compliments like "test load.."
Wasnt sure if he was being condescending.
My name is not Dave.
This contraption is an orphan and mixes peoples names up.
I wont use it.

[Thotheros]

'Dave' is a reference to HAL9000 from Arthur C. Clarkes 2001 A Space Odyssey.

[jc364]

Your comment made me laugh a little bit :)

[calculatorwatch]

it's running incredibly slow, why is it so hard to launch a search engine? luckily i don't think this slow launch will condemn Wolfram to the same fate that Cuil's horrible launch caused it

also, why is it always necessary to compare every search engine to google? this isn't even the same kind of search engine, the only way it will compete is when people are searching for a specific set of data, why do we need a google killer anyways?

Another thing I wonder about is who decided to call it Wolfram Alpha? why couldn't they name it something simple and accessible like Google or Ask? people would be much more drawn to it if it was just called Alpha

[monkeyfun14]

"it's running incredibly slow, why is it so hard to launch a search engine? luckily i don't think this slow launch will condemn Wolfram to the same fate that Cuil's horrible launch caused it"

Because its not just crawling websites its calculating data in real time which takes alot of resources when you could have 50k> queries at any given time. Plus as far as we know their webhosting consists of 2 super computer clusters which may or may not be enough.

[ddhboy]

Well I was right, Wolfram isn't google, far from it. Yeah you get data but I was surprised on just how limited the scale of the data was. Say you search for a company, you'd get a ton of information concerning their stock, but not much else. And aside from searching for data like stocks or base information on a city or something, Wolfram Alpha is far too limited for practical application as a stand alone and frankly, comes off as some beefed up Google Labs contraption. I'm sure its an impressive programming feat, but it won't make a splash on the web searching world, and I doubt we'll remember this thing a month or two from now.

[philosfool]

Well, I don't know whether it's meant to compete with google, but I wouldn't call sucking a new breed of search.

[diefinsternis]

Too slow. Way too slow.

Also, I do not see this as a competitor to Google. Google access a bigger data (like forums and non-official things).

[random0112358]

Other than the fact that both Google and Wolfram Alpha are search engines. There isn't much comparison to be made. Wolfram Alpha makes data computable; Google doesn't do anything like this at any where the scale of Wolfram Alpha.

That said, Wolfram Alpha is unlikely to reach the broad appeal of Google exactly because it's a different kind of tool, which doesn't appeal to a general audience. How many people are comfortable with scatter plots and bell curves and statistics? Not many relative to the general population.

As soon as they add servers / improve response time, this search engine will rock, imho. And I assume it will only get better as they expand the data sets. I guess that's the main hurdle that I see. They just need more processing power and perhaps more bandwidth.