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.


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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 19, 2009 at 9:48 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMay 19, 2009 at 11:48 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMay 19, 2009 at 1:54 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousMay 21, 2009 at 4:47 PM

    This is pretty neat but I'm a music geek

    ReplyDelete

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