

Tell HN: Wolfram Alpha preview goes live - anigbrowl

Does what it says on the tin. Accounts are private and there's no invites to hand out (sorry), but no NDAs or restrictions on reporting.<p>First impression: useful, but there's a learning curve. If you want a specific datum, it's usually there and presented in a a variety of useful contexts. Sometimes information is obviously there but it's not clear how to access it; for example, searching on 'Citizen Kane' will tell me it was directed by Orson Welles (along with other basic data), but searching on Orson Welles just gives the bare biographical data, not his filmography. It's not obvious how to dig that sort of information out.<p>The computational aspects are impressive and quite accessible thanks to good NLP; if you've already used Mathematica you'll be familiar with a lot of them. I feel like there's a great deal of power that I haven't properly learned how to manipulate yet. I'm looking forward to the aPI, which (per this morning's Webinar) Wolfram says will be public and IIRC, free.<p>Paid services will include license of the Alpha software for use on a company's internal datasets, as well as for commercial use of the data and 'large' computational tasks (whatever that means).<p>Finally, it's open to the public on May 18th.
======
anigbrowl
Some caveats, by the way:

\- it IS a preview: not everything is switched on \- it's NOT pretending to
offer natural language processing for general queries \- they're NOT
pretending to be a better Google or Wikipedia \- I don't know what I'm doing:
I'm in Fisher-Price mode, and there is a learning curve.

I am quite impressed, and also confused.

------
amichail
How often do you need an answer to something that is not already available on
the web and there is no other tool on the web that can compute it?

While Wolfram Alpha is more sophisticated than Google in some ways, Google is
better in terms of being practical for a much larger number of people.

In other words, this appears to be a niche product.

~~~
martythemaniak
And of course, you've come to this opinion after extensive use of Wolfram
Alpha over a good period of time. No? Just empty prejudices based on second-
hand impressions?

Honestly, what's with the battle lines being drawn? The product hasn't come
out yet, and basically no one has used it. It _seems_ like it will be an
excellent compliment to existing search engines and data sources, but you have
to _wait and see_.

~~~
amichail
In addition to second-hand impressions, there's a long history of failed
products/approaches similar to this one.

Google has found a sweet spot. And it won't change anytime soon.

~~~
volida
which are the the similar failed stories?

~~~
amichail
Natural language interfaces have failed repeatedly. And so have attempts at
the semantic web.

What does work and scales is more free form as is the case with the Web today.

And Google makes "free form" work.

~~~
volida
there are people out there that cant write in C. Does that mean good programs
wouldnt have been written in it?

------
mojuba
Those who are trying to reinvent data search are underestimating Google and
the Web at its present form. The fact that a search on any famous film
director or actor returns IMDB, or the fact that "When was JFK shot?"
(mentioned in another comment here) returns a highly relevant Wikipedia
article, tells us that the Web has already adjusted itself to be the semantic
Web, and most importantly, a simple and predictable one. In simple cases like
I mentioned above I know what to expect from Google, because I know how it
works and also the Web constantly fixes itself to be searched easily. So this
is a simple, very democratic and predictable system we all use successfully.

On the other hand, it is always hard to deal with systems that we have little
knowledge about. I suspect WA is the "hard" case.

So, what problem Wolfram is trying to solve? Anyone has any problems with
Google?

~~~
silentOpen
The problem is one most people don't know they have, unfortunately. Google
only lets you talk about crude keywords to find prebuilt data. If WA lives up
to the hype, you should be able to formulate a hypothesis involving arbitrary
supported datasets and have WA build you data tables and visualizations.

Will most people realize the sorts of questions they can ask? Probably not. Do
most SQL datasets get used to their fullest potential? Probably not. Imagine
what it does for the curious student, journalist, or professional, though.

Some things I'd like to see:

1\. Percentage of population in African countries with HIV/AIDS over time.
Regional, or demographically coded information would be interesting as well.
I'd also like it sourced. I could go look this up somewhere... or I could just
ask WA.

2\. Fertility vs. per capita GDP for countries/regions in the world.

This is not to mention all the historical event, chemical, physical, etc.
data.

Imagine NYT data visualizations built on WA data. Private data sets that
people slice and dice with WA and then sell specific visualizations, etc.

It's a problem we don't know we have. Success will critically depend on
flexibility, ease of use, and accurate and broad data sets.

~~~
mojuba
[http://www.google.com/search?q=Fertility+vs.+per+capita+GDP+...](http://www.google.com/search?q=Fertility+vs.+per+capita+GDP+for+countries)

You can click on the first link - your answers are there.

Notice that the two examples you gave belong to a fairly narrow field -
statistics, something that seems to be the trickiest to collect in more or
less structured form. But try it yourself, you'll see how easy it is to find
virtually anything nowadays. In most cases there's a good chance someone in
the world thought about something you are interested in and has put it out on
the Net already. If you are the first to ask a question, then I doubt WA will
give you useful results either.

~~~
jpd
The results for "Fertility vs. per capita GDP for continents" is significantly
less useful though.

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Fertil...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Fertility+vs.+per+capita+GDP+for+continents&btnG=Search)

~~~
mojuba
True, because neither is the question itself very useful, and thus nobody
cared to build an answer for it.

------
Jan-Jaap
I was wondering today what the average/median string length is in programming.
Google hadn't a clue. I'm curious if Wolfram does have an answer.

~~~
anigbrowl
You mean, how long is a piece of string?

~~~
Jan-Jaap
No. I'm currently implementing a VM, and was wondering whether there's any
point in inlining strings <= 3 chars in machine words. Knowing what percentage
of strings is <= 3 chars would tell me whether that's a worthwhile
optimization.

~~~
anigbrowl
Oh OK. I thought it was a rather abstracted joke =)

After thinking about your query, the only good idea I had was to take
something like a large open source codebase and write a program to search for
string/char declarations. It'd probably be faster just to try your idea and
see whether it helps or not :-/

Oh, and nothing about that on Alpha, sorry. I did ask it 'how long is a
string' for fun, and it suggested that the length of a given random string is
12. And who am I to argue?

------
markh
I'm looking forward to seeing if it can answer the question, "When was JFK
shot?". Was chatting with someone previously from PowerSet who maintains it
won't be able to, but I'm hoping he's wrong...

~~~
axod
That question is interesting from a techie AI perspective, but irrelevant for
end users IMHO. If they want to know when JFK was shot, they'd probably google
"jfk shot" or go to his wikipedia page and search in the page for 'shot'.

Getting users to 'unlearn' that behavior and instead use natural language, and
then trust the answer is going to be hard IMHO.

------
Radix
What does "Orson Welles' filmography" return?

~~~
anigbrowl
_Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input._

Like I say, I'm still finding out how to parse queries effectively,
particularly for comparison data...in between working (cough).

~~~
rms
How about "What is the complete list of films made by Orson Welles"?

~~~
sutro
How about "What are Google's search results for 'Orson Welles filmography'?"

