
Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites) - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/15/putting-wolfram-alpha-to-the-test-not-super-impressed-but-here-are-50-invites/
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pierrefar
There are three things at work here: 1\. How stale the index/data is. 2\. The
coverage of the data. 3\. The processing algorithms that do magic on the data
to return results.

These are the key things every search engine deals with.

Google, Yahoo!, and MS Live compensate for stale data by scheduling their
crawlers very cleverly. Google has published a few blog posts a while back
about how it does it (I'm sure it's even more improved now).

The breakthrough of W|A is number (3) in my list above. They kick ass and
frankly make search much more useful than anything we have now. You're no
longer searching for pages that have the info, but getting answers directly. A
Cambridge, UK, startup called True Knowledge does this too, and it's
impressive (W|A is much better in data presenation though).

So for an alpha product, please do not judge it by have stale or incomplete
data. It simply can't have all the data fresh from the get-go. Judge though by
how good or bad are the algos that power the search. The data is relatively
easy to get hold of when compared to writing awesome analysis code.

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jpwagner
Wolfram|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.

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asciilifeform
> 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.

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jerf
Honest curiousity: What computational-biology question would you ask
Wolfram|Alpha that you would expect a better answer to, vs. either Google,
conventional journal search, or asking your own local computing resources? (In
particular the questions that I know enough to ask, such as they are, would
seem to be more suited to local resources.)

(In fact, I'd open that question up to any other similar discipline.)

~~~
asciilifeform
Try getting any but the most widely used protein sequences out of it.

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jakozaur
I 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?

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dhs
In the preview Wolfram gave a couple weeks ago at Harvard [1], he mentioned
two sources of income:

1\. sponsors (in the sidebars)

2\. subscriptions (the main benefit being that you get to upload and run your
own data)

[1] video: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram>

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tlrobinson
Of course it's probably not going to return anything relevant when you enter
your own name, why should it? It's certainly not Google. I get the feeling the
author doesn't understand that.

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axod
I thought it was supposed to recognize it's a name and tell you interesting
facts about the first name - popularity over time etc.

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cyberian
Also, they have only provisioned for like 2000 requests a second [1], which
seems pitiful for launch day when every one and their mother will hit the
site.

[1] [http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-
poweri...](http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-powering-
computable-knowledge/)

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WilliamLP
Can I refresh the page to see the distance between the Moon and New York
change in real time, including accounting for the 1.3x10^-9 Earth-Moon
recession speed? If so that's pretty cool!

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Sujay
Are only 50 invites out because it gives computation time out error every now
and then. Or does it imply anything else?

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vaksel
seems like lack of current data is it's current achilles heel

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jpwagner
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.

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endtime
Okay...but surely some major organization has measured unemployment in New
York more recently than 3 years ago.

