Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#2seems like lack of current data is it's current achilles heel
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#3Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases (for now), not searching for your own name or an online newspaper/blog.
It is purposely NOT Google.
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#4seems like lack of current data is it's current achilles heel
I'm going to throw out there that Wolfram|Alpha might scrub it's sources' data more thoroughly. How can you trust unemployment data from a month ago? 2006 may have been some major study by INSERT_MAJOR_ORGANIZATION_HERE.
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#5Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases (for now), not searching for your own name or an online newspaper/blog. It is purposely NOT Google.
I agree, trying to out-Google Google is a bad idea.
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#6Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases (for now), not searching for your own name or an online newspaper/blog. It is purposely NOT Google.
> Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases
I have, so far, found it nearly useless academically. (Computational biology, to be specific.) Perhaps it will improve with time.
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#7Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases (for now), not searching for your own name or an online newspaper/blog. It is purposely NOT Google.
Even with academic queries it's very hit or miss. When you get something that returns relevant results it's a Eureka! moment, and you'll be impressed. But then you try a similar query and get zilch.
I suspect academics will try their queries on Wolfram first and turn to Google if that doesn't work. But after seeing too many "no results found" messages, they might just skip the Wolfram step entirely. Google might not have the fancy graphs, but it almost always returns some kind of relevant data.
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#8I am quite interested what is the business model for Wolfram Alpha. It seems that is rather focused on data analysis then searching.
It might be tough to rely solely on ads, but perhaps companies may be willing to pay to run their computational engine against their own data. It could be a great tool for exploring data.
The queries that we see right now could be hard to monetize. Lack of business cases and probably impractical to go mainstream.
Right now their are not any serious competition for Google. Refining the engine might help a bit, but I don't think their are going to replace ordinary search engine.
Any links or comments regarding the issue?
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#9Are only 50 invites out because it gives computation time out error every now and then. Or does it imply anything else?
Re: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites)
#10I am quite interested what is the business model for Wolfram Alpha. It seems that is rather focused on data analysis then searching. It might be tough to rely solely on ads, but perhaps companies may be willing to pay to run their computational engine against their own data. It could be a great tool for exploring data. The queries that we see right now could be hard to monetize. Lack of business cases and probably im…
Maybe the business model (for now) is just that it's a tech demo for Mathematica?