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Andrew Stephens · Apr 30, 2009, 02:17 PM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026331.stm

Wolfram Alpha describes itself as a computational knowledge engine using normal English to understand questions. In addition to presenting straight forward search results it aims to pull data from various sources across the web and perform calculations and analysis to present common sense answers.

Sounds interesting and potentially useful as it would carve out a separate niche from Google. Plenty of money behind it too.

Launching sometime in May (apparently). I'm keen to give it a try.

Doofy · Apr 30, 2009, 02:38 PM

I can't see the web sites it pulls information off being happy with the loss of ad revenue which this sounds like it entails.

Chuckit · Apr 30, 2009, 02:57 PM

Google already does this to some degree. For example, search for "Barack Obama's height" and Google will just come right out and tell you. At any rate, I don't see this being as useful as Google, because a very large portion of the things people want to know can't be expressed as a question with a single, succinct answer (and for those that can, most of the time Google will either answer itself or the answer will be in the summary of the first result).

cwkmacuser · Apr 30, 2009, 06:39 PM

Yeah, but google isn't very good for searching for questions like "Where does the Califronia Zephyr Go?" It just gives you a bunch of junk.

Chuckit · Apr 30, 2009, 06:46 PM

You really think you're going to get better info writing that question into this thing than just searching "California zephyr" on Google? Where do you reckon it gets its info?

cwkmacuser · Apr 30, 2009, 07:08 PM

That was only an example. My point is, Google just doesn't work well when your search term is a question.

Chuckit · Apr 30, 2009, 07:13 PM

So the major innovation here is that you have to take longer to write out your search terms?

cwkmacuser · Apr 30, 2009, 07:27 PM

Not at all. It would just be nice to have a search engine that recognizes questions. That's all.

TETENAL · May 17, 2009, 12:17 PM

It's up now, but not yet really useful in my opinion.

shifuimam · May 17, 2009, 12:22 PM

Originally Posted by Doofy

I can't see the web sites it pulls information off being happy with the loss of ad revenue which this sounds like it entails.

Do you care about anything other than how much money is lost by this or that?

If you don't want your information to be crawled by a search engine, don't put it online.

There are billions of websites that rip content directly from other sites, therefore "stealing" ad revenue from the original site. BFD. This is not a remotely new concept on the Internet.

Also: that site is horrendously slow. Lame.

Big Mac · May 17, 2009, 12:44 PM

It wasn't slow for me, but it wasn't very useful. It doesn't seem to answer any natural language questions yet. Google's grip on the search market is safe for now.

cwkmacuser · May 17, 2009, 12:45 PM

Yeah, it's just an alpha, which means it won't be that good for a while. I'll keep looking and wait for a BETA to try.

Chuckit · May 17, 2009, 01:26 PM

Maybe I'm just showing my age, but isn't an alpha release supposed to include the product's core functionality, albeit possibly in a very buggy state?

cwkmacuser · May 17, 2009, 01:30 PM

Perhaps you are right. I'm not correct about everything.

gradient · May 17, 2009, 01:53 PM

Yeesh....I can't get this site to give me results on anything. I've tried 8 different searches and all I get is... "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input". Google nailed the answer to all of my searches in the top 3 results.

This needs a lot of work, it seems.

Doofy · May 17, 2009, 02:02 PM

Originally Posted by shifuimam

Do you care about anything other than how much money is lost by this or that?

Yes. I also care about cats. And boobies.

Chuckit · May 17, 2009, 02:03 PM

First search: "Who is the president of the US?"
Answer: Barack Obama, complete with a bunch of information about him
(It got one!)

Second search: "Who sang 'I Shot the Sheriff'?"
Answer: Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input
(I was thinkin' Bob Marley.)

Third search: "Who is John Galt?"
Answer: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
(No, seriously, that's what it said. I guess Wolfram Alpha is a spoiler-free search engine?)

Doofy · May 17, 2009, 02:07 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Third search: "Who is John Galt?"
Answer: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
(No, seriously, that's what it said. I guess Wolfram Alpha is a spoiler-free search engine?)

On the right, there's a panel which says something like "newbies, try a date". So I did. And it came up with that "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".

1) I was only doing what it told me to do.
2) My name's not Dave.

Conclusion: It's crap.

cwkmacuser · May 17, 2009, 06:53 PM

I hope they don't end up charging for this CRAP!

- - e r i k - - · May 17, 2009, 07:11 PM

Tried it for a couple of searches. Searching for weather information is amazing. All sorts of historical data and nice graphs popped up.

Apple Pro Underwear · May 18, 2009, 01:45 AM

i'm not sure how i feel about this. wikipedia + google now is pretty good but i don't necessarily believe it 100%. I certainly would be even more skeptical of this service.

Big Mac · May 18, 2009, 02:33 AM

I want to see the successor to Wikipedia. Or, I'd like to invent it - I have a number of ideas for improving upon it. As for Google, it's going to take a tremendous amount of resources to ever hope to rival it.

Kerrigan · May 18, 2009, 05:03 PM

Seems a bit pointless in its present state.

- - e r i k - - · May 18, 2009, 05:35 PM

Good thing it's already in beta:

Computizzled Knowledge Engine