
Ask HN: What happened to Wolfram Alpha? - freediver
I am searching for &quot;who won superbowl three years ago?&quot; and came to WA first<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&#x2F;input&#x2F;?i=who+won+superbowl+three+years+ago%3F<p>Surprisingly Google is able to handle it no problem.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=who+won+superbowl+three+years+ago%3F&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8<p>Wasn&#x27;t it supposed to be the other way around?
======
calanjoyce
Thanks for pointing this out. We _do_ have the right data, but in this case we
got a bit tripped up on our own cleverness. You can see from Wolfram|Alpha's
input interpretation that we parsed "three years ago" as "today minus three
years" — compare with
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=three+years+ago](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=three+years+ago)
and you'll see why that's a problem: since there wasn't a Super Bowl game
played on July 30, 2015, we (correctly, given this interpretation) tell you
that there are no Super Bowl results for your specified date.

But obviously that's not what any actual person means by "3 years ago" in this
context, so we'll just have to fix a bug there to be a little less precise in
our date computation.

Of course there are lots of different ways to ask questions about the Super
Bowl...

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+won+the+superbowl+f...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+won+the+superbowl+for+the+2014-15+season)
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+the+super+bowl...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+the+super+bowl+with+the+patriots+vs+seahawks)

===

C. Alan Joyce

Director of Content Development, Wolfram|Alpha

~~~
calanjoyce
And actually, I didn't even notice at first that Wolfram|Alpha already has
competing assumptions for how we treat "years" — it's just that the best
interpretation in this case isn't already the default:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+won+the+super+bowl+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+won+the+super+bowl+three+years+ago&assumption=%7B%22C%22,+%22years%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%22EnglishWord%22%7D)

~~~
freediver
Thanks that makes a lot of sense!

------
smt88
WA flawlessly understood the question. It just seems to be lacking the right
data.

