Trying out WolframAlpha
The computational engine WolframAlpha (WA) became available to the general public today. I took a quick look and my initial impression is that this is a site that will probably be little used by many (maybe most) home PC owners. This is not a conventional search engine. It is, however, a facility that researchers and students will likely find useful. People with a mathematical bent will especially enjoy it since you can do things like evaluating integral calculus expressions with it. In fact, it is something akin to Wolfram’s well known software Mathematica combined with a large database.
The best way to get an idea of what it does is to go to the site and try a few queries. Just to give a little flavor of what it does and doesn’t do, here’s some things I tried both at WA and at Google. First, I asked, “distance to Jupiter”. This is the sort of thing that is right up WA’s alley. Right away it told me the present distance from the earth to Jupiter and also gave the maximum and minimum distances to the sun in Jupiter’s orbit. Google, of course, doesn’t give the answer directly but gave me links. In fact, the top listed links contained similar information about Jupiter but that involved deciding which link to go to and then clicking on the link. This illustrates a strength of WA – answers can come directly.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that WA doesn’t know about. I asked it how many computers there were in the world and it couldn’t answer. Google presented a raft of links and the first few did contain an answer. Actually, they all referred to the same estimate someone made in 2007 of the number of PCs. (If you care, it was one billion.) This estimate, of course, is out of date and illustrates a weakness of search engines; their listings are often not recent links. Also, there is no way to be sure about the reliability of information. The database at WA is said to be gathered by humans so when it does give an answer it may have been checked.
Then, I asked “origin of apple”. I was interested in the fruit but expected some reference to Macs or Steve Jobs as well. I got neither fruit nor computer from WA; it only gave me a very sparse note that the word “apple” first appeared in the language around 1400. I tried adding “fruit” to the query and then WA said it didn’t understand. Google gave me the usual myriad of links but the top listed ones were all about the history and origin of the fruit – just what I wanted. And that was without mentioning fruit in the search term. So Google won again.
Finally, I tried evaluating some integral calculus expressions and that worked like a charm. And that, of course, Google doesn’t do.
Try out WA for yourself and let us know what you think.
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