

Wolfram Alpha: ‘People Just Need What We Are Doing’ - spottiness
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/wolfram-alpha-two/

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veidr
I tend to wolfram it when googling it fails. E.g. when considering buying a
new place in Tokyo:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+interest+rat...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+interest+rates+in+Japan)

Compare those awesome results to the crap google offers:

[http://www.google.com/search?safari&rls=en&q=histori...](http://www.google.com/search?safari&rls=en&q=historical+interest+rates+in+Japan&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

Google is more generally useful, and has changed all of our lives for the
better. Nevertheless, Wolfram Alpha is far more useful in certain contexts, in
my experience, and not necessarily just for mathy stuff.

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dxbydt
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=savings+rate+US> vs
<http://www.google.com/search?q=savings+rate+US>

no contest.

I use wolfram exclusively for all my economics homeworks. Google is quite
useless for that.

Say I'm crunching mortgage data. The engine needs to hit

[http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/releases/mortoutst...](http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/releases/mortoutstand/current.htm)

and calculate totals & graph that. Wolfram does those things. Google doesn't.

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hugh3
I like Wolfram Alpha, but despite being way towards the top of the "people
most likely to find a use for Wolfram Alpha" list, I've only found a use for
Wolfram Alpha a couple of times. I use Google Calculator all the freaking
time, and only resort to Wolfram Alpha on the odd occasion that Google
Calculator fails me.

Does anyone use it regularly?

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dreeves
Yes, I use it regularly. Most common is for the kinds of things you might find
in the CIA Factbook, or any number you'd expect to be buried in a Wikipedia
page.

The most recent thing I was impressed by was this:
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+sunburn>

I also tried creating a widget with WolframAlpha that seemed potentially
useful: <http://beeminder.com/agename.html> (ie, getting a probability
distribution on a person's age based on their first name)

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T-R
The sunburn one is a cool concept, but most of the data I put in tells me that
sunburn is unlikely in Phoenix, AZ.

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crag
Or that a sunburn is unlikely in Miami, Florida (which is where I am).

~~~
dreeves
That's because it was night time. :) You can actually include a time and date.

Another handy heuristic: worry about sunburn when your shadow's shorter than
you.

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jasim
Most people who've commented about using Wolfram Alpha are just using just its
Mathematica backend - calculations, plotting graphs etc. I found this pretty
useful while trying to solve some algorithmic coding challenges which involved
large numbers. Mathematica works with numbers larger than what either Python
or Ruby can support.

But otherwise apart from the Math part, haven't heard any use case yet where
the data analysis that Wolfram Alpha does was terribly useful.

~~~
foob
I find it very useful when dealing with unit conversions and fundamental
constants. Google is fine for simple stuff but Alpha really excels when you
have extremely complicated combinations of units. This probably doesn't matter
much outside of physics but within it Wolfram Alpha is a godsend.

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btcoal
When I'm planning out my meals I use W|A to calculate calories. It's
incredibly useful for this. I love that it not only gives point estimates for
fat, sodium, etc., but also plots the distribution of these values:
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4oz+turkey+breast> Other than this, very
special case, I never use it. And I am a former Mathematica fanatic.

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vpdn
"I’ve been lucky enough to run a company that’s been profitable for 23 years,
so I developed the habit of doing things that way [..] That’s a way of doing
business, that if you think about it, computes much better than getting tens
of millions in funding for an iPhone app."

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ojosilva
_But Wolfram is frustrated a bit that users don’t know the full power of
Wolfram Alpha. “The mental model for when to go to Wolfram Alpha is not fully
fleshed out yet,” Wolfram says._

This frustration reminds me of Google Wave, a wonderful idea, on the verge of
being totally disruptive, but that the average user wouldn't grasp. Hopefully
WA can sort that out, otherwise it may just remain a web API to a data-rich
Mathematica, which in any case is a nice thing to have.

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armored
I purchased the Android app, but I find I just don't use it that much. I'm not
even sure that it's that the 'mental model' isn't fleshed out yet, it's just
that Google got there first. Search, scan, refine. It's how I think now. Maybe
there is a space for Alpha at the end of that sequence.

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gfodor
Still waiting on W|A to incorporate basic usability improvements I proposed
back in 2009:

[http://codingthriller.blogspot.com/2009/05/fixing-
wolframalp...](http://codingthriller.blogspot.com/2009/05/fixing-
wolframalpha.html)

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pnathan
Queries that I have are usually answered by DuckDuckGo/Wikipedia.

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wrrice
Running a query on 'linux users' returns, among other things, phone keypad
digits for 'l-i-n-u-x', and Scrabble scoring.

Not what I need.

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46Bit
It's not a search engine. It's an information engine. Enter what you want, not
just two random words with no 'question'.

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wrrice
I then asked 'how many people are using Linux?'. It seems to think I'm asking
'how many people use the word 'Linux', as it returns the same result set as my
initial query (word definitions and such). I ran the same query again with
'Linux' as an operating system topic, and it tells me that "Development of
this topic is under investigation.."

Then it asks me to leave my email address to show interest.

