Saturday, May 16, 2009

Wolfram Alpha is live

Wolfram Alpha is an answer-engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, instead of providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer.

I went live last night. I'm still trying to make up my mind on how I feel. I don't think it will ever be a "google killer" (sorry for the cliché), but it is quirky and cool. However, it keeps timing out on my search tests, so I haven't been able to do a thorough investigation.

Also, here's an MIT Technology Review article on how Google and Wolfram Alpha match up, and a neat article from the Wolfram Alpha blog on how the "computational knowledge engine" interacts with Mathmatica.


4 comments:

  1. quirly as hell would be generous. I can't get it to do anything interesting.

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  2. Kas Thomas had a similar take and said it felt "very alpha"

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  3. Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

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