Wolfram Alpha is live; give us your impressions
(Credit:
Screenshot by Michelle Meyers/CNET)
Wolfram Alpha is live, and we want your feedback.
Following a delay due to technical glitches, the new "computational knowledge engine" went live to the public Friday night, and we're interested in learning more about the public's initial experiences with the service. If in case you missed it, Wolfram Alpha can be found here.
You may want to familiarize yourself with the service before giving it a try. For more background on how Wolfram Alpha works, read this exchange between CNET's Stephen Shankland and Rafe Needleman, who were given early access to the service. This photo gallery of screenshots will let you know what to expect as you put the new service through its pace.
Once you get your hands on it (so to speak) we're mostly interested in whether or not you feel it retrieved the results you were looking for, or answered the questions you entered. Try broad queries like the weather; try specific queries about your favorite sports team, hometown, or profession.
And once you've kicked the tires, please fill out the form below so we can measure the search engine's performance and relevance during its debut. Wolfram has already warned us that the service might encounter initial launch problems over the weekend, so keep that in mind.
Thanks for your help, and we'll follow up next week with the results.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
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?
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.
:)
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.
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.
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
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.
Also, I do not see this as a competitor to Google. Google access a bigger data (like forums and non-official things).
- by random0112358 May 16, 2009 2:55 PM PDT
- 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.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (45 Comments)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.