Test Driving the Wolfram Alpha

SilverMind writes in to note a blog entry at Byte Size Biology describing in detail a few hours spent with Wolfram Alpha (which we have discussed before). "After playing around with Wolfram Alpha for a few hours, I can safely say the following: it's different, it's incomplete, it's idiosyncratic, and it's funky cool. And no, it will not dethrone Google, nor does it aim to do so."

Comments

Re:Needs a better name

[Lemmy Caution]

"Ralph."

E.g., "can you tell me the names of the original members of the Bay City Rollers?" "Ralph it for yourself."

Re:Needs a better name

[Ilgaz]

Can you say "Observables for the Analysis of Event Shapes in e+ e- Annihilation and Other Processes" without taking a breath? Mr. Wolfram can :)

Seriously, that is not a general search engine or even engine as we understand today. It is something else. It is the click happy IT media which compares it to Google and I am sure people at Wolfram research either laughs or cries because of it.

Re:Needs a better name

[Bakkster]

Also, quite aside from all that, why the hell wouldn't one compare it to google when people would be using it for the exact same purpose.

People might use Wikipedia for the same purpose as Google, that doesn't mean we should compare them. The people who expect every Google search to work in Alpha are wrong. Those who expect genetic, scientific, or mathematical comparisons to work in Google as it is now are equally wrong. Hell, Alpha doesn't even search the internet, it has its own information database.

How are the two comparable again?