Webware

The iPhone app for Wolfram Alpha (iTunes store link) got approved by Apple surprisingly quickly, I was told in a breathless e-mail from Wolfram PR on Sunday. But the real surprise was the price: The app is $49.99.

The rationale is twisted.

"It's less than half the price of a graphing calculator, but it does more," the rep told me. By the way, "price of a graphing calculator" is a calculation that Wolfram Alpha can't compute.

For much, much less than the price of a graphing calculator, or $0.00, you can point your iPhone's Safari browser at Wolframalpha.com and have full access to the service for free. Divide by that, Wolfie.

Also, the $49.99 price doesn't get you an actual standalone graphing calculator, since the app doesn't work when it doesn't have a Web connection.

The Wolfram Alpha iPhone app makes it easier to enter calculation queries.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Now, to be fair, the iPhone app is a much better way to use Wolfram than the Web site, for a few reasons.

The Wolfram Web site renders all answers, even text, as GIF graphics, which means that text doesn't automatically wrap, or even scale well, on the iPhone's small screen. The app fixes that, and results render nicely on the iPhone. Also, entering complex queries using numbers and symbols on the iPhone's standard keyboard is a real drag, but the Wolfram app has a special keyboard that gives fast access to the symbols you'll need if you're a heavy Wolfram user.

There are several other nice features. You can bookmark queries, e-mail them, and Twitter them. They really do make the Wolfram app very handy for frequent users, and it's those power Wolframers that the app is targeted at. If you need it, then the "price of 12 lattes from Starbucks," which I'm told is another way the team is thinking of the price, is as they might say in the halls of some physics departments, trivial.

But as they would tell you in the economics department, you're being taken for a ride.

Also, Wolfram Alpha doesn't know the price of 12 Starbucks lattes either, but it did tell me the stock price of SBUX and, to its credit, if you enter "12 lattes" as a query, you'll get all sorts of nutritional information, such as calorie content for the 12 lattes (1,654), carbohydrates (61 percent of daily recommended intake), and cholesterol (162 mg).

Just like the dozen lattes, this app is hard to swallow.

Previously: Wolfram Alpha opens API to developers.

Developers can now put Wolfram Alpha results in their own applications. The company today opened up its API to open access, allowing coders to query the Wolfram system and incorporate its data, calculations, and rich media results.

The company put out a blog post about the new API without showcasing any example apps. However, the post, by Wolfram's Schoeller Porter, does mention developer ideas for using Wolfram Alpha programmatically, from "researching cancer through computational biology" to "determining the optimal temperature for draft beer based on the current weather conditions."

A spokesperson for Wolfram confirms that the API is also being used internally to develop the forthcoming Wolfram iPhone app.

Access to the API is not free. The cost to use it depends on volume and intended use. The smallest developer plan, which provides 1,000 API lookups, is a one-time $60 plus $0.08 per additional request. Monthly plans range from $2,000 for 25,000 requests up to $220,000 for 10 million requests.

SF weather

(Credit: Screenshot by Dave Rosenberg/CNET)

According to the Guardian, Wolfram will be opening its curated data to be queried via an application programming interface, or API. Currently, you can view results in a browser, export them as a PDF, or "play" them using a Mathematica plug-in. The ability to use the data on other sites and for other means, such as computations in spreadsheets, is appealing, if not earth-shattering.

Wolfram's launch fanfare was followed by much confusion about what Wolfram actually is. One thing that's clear is that the service has an impressive amount of data. What's not clear is if and when it will ever make money.

APIs are at least a good start in relation to monetization--holding the Alpha data captive within its site meant that it would never go beyond its own traffic, a recipe for disappointment and counter to the link economy that has been built around sites like Twitter.

In today's socialized Internet, APIs to your data are the barrier (or door) to getting users hooked on your data. Regardless of whether through an API that controls a cloud service like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), or the ability to get communications in and out of Facebook, users want to consume data in the way they feel most comfortable. Any company that creates or aggregates data needs to make it available, if it expects to ever hit critical mass.

CNET News' Tom Krazit recently wrote about a licensing deal between Microsoft's Bing "decision engine" and Wolfram Alpha (two non-search engines join up to create a super search engine?) that "allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates."

If Microsoft is serious about taking on Google's geek factor, and asserting its dominant position in spreadsheets and higher education as Bing grows, then the data from Wolfram adds a new dimension. From the consumer perspective, the more informed the data is, the better, but both Bing and Alpha have a long way to go to catch up to Google.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

Bing will start using Wolfram Alpha's data in search results following a licensing deal.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Microsoft's Bing search engine is getting a little help from a very smart friend.

Wolfram Alpha and Bing have reached a licensing deal that allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates, according to a source familiar with the deal. The deal was reported earlier by TechCrunch.

Representatives from Microsoft and Wolfram Research declined to comment on the deal.

Wolfram Alpha's unique blend of computational input and curated output hasn't taken the world by storm, but it is considered an interesting enough take on the business of Internet search to attract high-profile attention within the industry. Wolfram Alpha doesn't return the usual list of links to pages with search keywords, instead providing answers to questions such as stock prices and complex mathematical formulas--with mixed results.

Bing, on the other hand, is enjoying a solid start in the three months since it made its debut as it gains users and will at some point be the default search experience on Yahoo's highly trafficked pages following a long-awaited deal. It's not clear whether Bing results will carry Wolfram's branding (i.e., results "Powered By Wolfram Alpha"), but there will be some sort of presence.

It's unlikely that Bing is going to turn over the bulk of its results to Alpha, however. In a blog post Friday, Wolfram founder Stephen Wolfram admitted that linguistic problems are to blame for half of the occasions when Wolfram Alpha doesn't return a result. That percentage is changing as Wolfram refines the science behind Wolfram Alpha, but it will take some time.

Corrected at 3:30 p.m. PDT to clarify that half the time Wolfram Alpha doesn't understand an input query, it's due to linguistic problems. An earlier version suggested that Wolfram Alpha didn't understand queries half the time.

Bill James--the father of the modern approach to baseball statistics--probably wouldn't like the results produced by Wolfram Alpha.

(Credit: CBS News)

It's been two months since Wolfram Alpha launched, and in some ways, the "computation knowledge engine" is still fouling off pitches.

Wolfram used the occasion of Major League Baseball's 2009 All-Star Game--otherwise known as the three most boring days of the baseball season--to highlight the ability of Wolfram Alpha to process baseball-related queries. "...what we at Wolfram Alpha love about baseball are all of the fast statistics that can be quickly computed and returned as easy-to-read graphs," the company said in a blog post.

A few examples were provided, such as the ability to see whether the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox had more wins last year, as well as a graph showing how many wins each club has had for all the seasons since 1960. Likewise, you can see which team had more home runs last year.

But for the most part, Wolfram Alpha is unable to deliver a shocking amount of baseball-related data. Baseball--easily the most statistically obsessed sport of the four major American professional sports--should be right in Wolfram Alpha's wheelhouse.

It's not. While the ability to settle arguments about wins and home runs among teams could avert as many as 27 percent of all baseball-related bar fights (statistic possibly made up), both the casual fan and the fantasy baseball junkie need far more information.

Wolfram Alpha was unable to determine which team or player had the most home runs in 2008. It was unable to tell me what Alex Rodriguez's batting average is for 2009, or for his entire career. Nor did it have any information about the modern baseball statistics that are a mathematician's dream, such as win shares or VORP--value over replacement player.

Google, on the other hand, was unable to tell me at first glance who led the league in home runs last year (Ryan Howard) in the first 10 results for "most home runs 2008," but was able to tell me A-Rod's batting average and define the terms win shares and VORP in the first few search results. Yahoo and Bing had similar trouble with identifying Ryan Howard's performance last year, but nailed the other queries, with Bing even providing A-Rod's up-to-date 2009 statistics.

Baseball's embrace of statistic information over the past decade is one of the most important non-pharmaceutical related trends the game has seen in quite some time. "Sabermetrics," as it's called, has prompted several baseball teams to employ at least one mathematician/statistical guru to assess the performance of its players as well as potential players the team might want to acquire.

Wolfram Alpha--backed by a powerful statistical engine--has the potential to be the tool for those devotees of the game, but does not understand enough query input terms at the moment to be a viable option. Wolfram Alpha is flirting with the Mendoza Line when it comes to baseball statistics; although, of course, it's a little confused about the definition of the Mendoza Line.

Say what you will about Wolfram Alpha, the creators are hard at work trying to drum up interest in the site.

On Tuesday, the WA crew launched a number of updates to its service, some of which I tested. Now the team's Thursday blog points you to the many "cool tools" you can use to access the site--buttons, widgets, gadgets, and more. You can grab them from the Wolfram Alpha download page, where you'll find the tools organized by operating system and browser. I took them all for a spin to see how they fared.

Toolbars
Wolfram Alpha toolbars are available for Firefox 2 and 3 and Internet Explorer 6 or higher. I installed separate toolbars on both Firefox 3 and IE 8. After setup, the toolbar popped up displaying a text field where I could type my search term directly.

Since Wolfram Alpha's forte is mathematical questions, I asked the question: "What is the value of pi?" (I'm sure we all remember from high school that pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.) As expected, the traditional WA search told me it was 3.14 followed by more digits than I cared to count. So far, so good.

Then I experimented with the other toolbar buttons and learned that each one pointed me to different results on the same question. One button points to a page called the Wolfram Demonstration project to illustrate mathematical concepts. Here I could see the value of pi in action by watching a 3D globe with changing dimensions. A button for the Mathematical Documentation center showed me links to complex equations involving pi. Buttons for Wolfram MathWorld and Wolfram Research linked to mathematical and scientific articles on pi. More than I'd ever want to know about pi, but I know it'd make my old algebra teacher smile.

Wolfram Alpha helps me with pi.

Windows Deskband
The Deskband installed a Wolfram Alpha search tool on my Windows taskbar. Here the same options were available as with the browser toolbar but conveniently accessible from my desktop. Another handy tool.

Windows Desktop gadget
I next tried the Windows Vista Desktop gadget, which plopped a Wolfram Alpha search field on my Vista sidebar. This came without links to the other sources that were accessible from the toolbar, so I didn't find it quite as useful.

Search engine add-ins
This tool added Wolfram Alpha to my browser's list of default search providers. Quick and easy to install, and it worked well in both Firefox and IE.

iGoogle gadget
I use iGoogle as my personalized home page and rely on all of the gadgets available, so I liked this one. The Wolfram Alpha gadget is similar to the sidebar gadget--displaying a single text field for my query.

Internet Explorer 8 accelerator
I installed the Wolfram Alpha Accelerator for Internet Explorer 8. Accelerators let you select text on a Web page to quickly search on it using different sources. Most of the text I found on a typical Web site didn't lend itself to a Wolfram Alpha computational search, so I found little value here.

Mac OS X Dashboard widget
I couldn't test the OS X Dashboard widget because I don't yet have have a Mac. (No comments from Mac users please; it's on my shopping list.) But it should work similarly to its Windows counterpart. I did get the screenshot below from my colleague Stephen Shankland.

Wolfram Alpha Mac widget

Some of the tools did help me see more value in Wolfram Alpha. Of course, they also serve to promote the site, but that's okay by me as long as they work. Of all the downloads, the WA toolbar and deskband demonstrated more of the scope and versatility of Wolfram Alpha by pointing me to different sources--something I didn't know about just from using the Web site.

Wolfram Research's Stephen Wolfram will take live questions over the Internet Thursday on Wolfram Alpha.

(Credit: Wolfram Research)

Wolfram Research is looking for feedback on its new Wolfram Alpha service.

The company plans to hold a Webcast Thursday at 2 p.m. PDT on Justin.tv to discuss Wolfram Alpha, now entering its third week of existence. "We thought you'd enjoy hearing Stephen Wolfram respond to some of this feedback directly," Wolfram said in a blog post Monday afternoon.

CNET readers had plenty of feedback for Wolfram Alpha following its initial debut, marred by technical glitches and an incomplete understanding of how the service was meant to be used. Anyone who didn't get a chance to pose their comments, or still had questions after our comprehensive look at Wolfram Alpha, might want to participate in the Webcast.

We'll also be watching the Webcast, and will report on the questions and answers posed to Stephen Wolfram on Thursday afternoon.

One week after a shaky debut, Wolfram Alpha is a lot more stable but is still having trouble defining exactly why information seekers should give it a try.

Any new search service that attempts to launch in the Age of Google is in for inevitable comparisons to the search giant. (And any search hopeful should also strive to learn from the unhappy launch of Google challenger Cuil last summer.)

Wolfram Alpha excels at computational queries, but many CNET readers weren't so sure what was in it for them.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

But Wolfram Alpha says it represents something very different, and that people should not treat its "computational engine" the same way they do Google's search box. CNET readers learned that the hard way.

We asked readers to give us their impressions of Wolfram Alpha following its debut last Friday, and the results were not good. Asked to judge how happy they were with the outcome of their searches, readers gave Wolfram Alpha an average score of 3.55, with 1 being "most satisfied" and 5 being least.

For the most part, readers were dissatisfied with Wolfram Alpha's ability to produce results for anything outside of a relatively narrow set of queries related to math, science, or statistics. Forty percent said they would not recommend Wolfram Alpha to friends, while 28 percent thought it was only appropriate for "serious data nerds." (Percentages based on 1,459 responses.)

"This might not be what Wolfram Alpha is intended for but I think people used to Google and Wikipedia will expect to get some kind of answer," wrote one reader. "I think you should always give them something, even if the query is a little out of scope."

Another reader wrote, "For the moment their data seems incomplete. They can't answer many questions on anatomy or prescription medication."

Wolfram Alpha does crawl the Web for information. But it is distinct from Google in that a human being on Wolfram Research's staff must vet any sources used to generate data, said Jean Buck, director of computable data initiatives. Of the 200 people or so at Wolfram Research working on Wolfram Alpha, just 25 or so are working full time on data curation, she said.

Given Wolfram Research's history as the developers of the Mathematica software, the company is laden with experts in sophisticated math and science topics, Buck said, and therefore it shouldn't be all that surprising that results for those types of queries produce far more useful answers.

The harder part is about to come, as Wolfram adds data related to socioeconomic trends and attempts to diplomatically handle issues such as how to categorize Taiwan. Just this week, Wolfram staffers had a meeting over what to do about the entry on Macedonia, which is a country recognized by the United Nations as emerging from the remnants of the former republic of Yugoslavia but also refers to a wider region that incorporates parts of Greece and other countries on the Balkan Peninsula.

All those decisions are made by humans, not computers, which means the number of people dedicated to reviewing data for Wolfram Alpha is going to have to dramatically increase as the company beefs up sections on sports, cars, and food, three priorities listed for the coming months.

Don't expect Wolfram Alpha to present information about the causes of the Civil War.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

This also means that Wolfram Alpha visitors should never expect to find results for queries such as "causes of the Civil War," Buck said. Right now, a query for "Civil War" on Wolfram Alpha returns a reference to a book called "The Civil War," which is essentially the text version of the interminable movie made by Ken Burns.

"Our emphasis is always going to be on the computational aspect of things," Buck said. Wolfram Alpha, at some point, will be able to verify the dates of the Civil War, generals who were involved, and the location of key battles, but won't provide information on the causes of the war or the thinking behind strategic decisions.

But even that will take time, meaning that Wolfram Alpha users interested in those types of queries are probably better off searching the Web the old-fashioned way. "People think it's replacing search, and it's not. It's a different thing, it's complementary to search," said John Ekizian, a Wolfram spokesman.

Some CNET readers grasped that after a few spins around the block with Wolfram Alpha. "I found nothing to like except the audacity of the attempt and the hope that it will improve," wrote one reader.

Another reader perhaps summed it up best: "It looks like it'll be good for something, but I'm not yet sure how it will serve me, an ordinary person. It's not readily apparent how to use it most effectively. It may just be a matter of a learning curve for a new way of thinking about inquiries."

If you've casually been using Wolfram Alpha, but don't want to give up your Google addiction reliance, there's hope for you yet. A new Firefox extension lets you keep using Google, while showing Wolfram Alpha results on the side of the page.

I've been using it all morning and it's a nice addition if you're a search enthusiast. Your Google results come in just as quickly as they usually do, while the Wolfram ones catch-up on the side. This makes it a good way to test some of the limitations of the new search engine, as it only covers so many topics. My favorite use for it is to pull up nutritional information for fast food and cast lists for movies. Both are activities that usually require going off the results page to find the information I was looking for, whereas Wolfram simply grabs and displays it in an orderly fashion.

The only drawback I've run into with this extension is that it can clip off the bottom of the Wolfram Alpha results unless you've got Google set to show 20 or more search results per page. On some of the longer entries this this means you're not seeing potentially important information. On the plus side, there's a quick link to redo the search in Wolfram Alpha, in a different browser tab.

Note: This extension is experimental, which means you need to be registered with Mozilla's add-ons directory to install it in your browser.

Installing the Wolfram Alpha Google extension for Firefox adds Wolfram Alpha search results next to every Google query.

(Credit: CNET)