Wolfram|Alpha

[swirly]

I used it for a while when it was still in beta testing and just after it was released, but abandoned it after noticing that a lot of the results were plain wrong. You can also get better info on most searches off google. It's good for a few calculations though, but not for much else.

I think the issue is that this isn't really what it is meant for. It isn't really a search, but rather a program trying to look at data and draw comparisons or correlations. I freely admit that I don't really understand it myself. From hearing Stephen Wolfram talk about it though, it really isn't meant to be used to find data that you can find just by using google. Let me quote him. (taken from http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/TWiT_195/Transcript)

right now, Wolfram|Alpha is mostly making use of kind of old kind of science facts, it’s making use of the models and methods and so on, that have been developed in science and physics and financial analysis and lots of other areas over the course of a few – of the last few hundred years. What this kind of – what the ultimate sort of direction that one can go in is not just to say, here’s a question we have to ask which can answered by existing science and now Wolfram|Alpha can actually answer it quickly for you on the web type thing, but say here is a question that I have for which I have to sort of invent a new model, something that science has never produced for us, to go out and discover sort of a new algorithm. Now can we do this thing of going out and sort of, going and sampling this – mining the computational Universe to find something to sort of invent on the fly.

Here’s a fun thing that I just was really surprised by. Given you can know like from birth record, you can know how many people named I don’t know, Stephen or something, were born in each year for the last 100 years or so. But then you can use kind of mortality data to figure out, so just how many will be surviving at this time and so on. And from that you can get kind of a distribution of what the expected ages of people will be. And it’s really bizarre because an awful lot of people, particularly with slightly unusual names, you can basically predict from their name roughly how old they are.

Now this information may not have any real value or meaning, but I think it is more the purpose of the site. To find areas of relation and attempt to see what can be figured out by it. Which may result in useless information, but it might be interesting as well. Like I said in my first post though, I've yet to find a real use for it myself. I just don't think people should be going to it trying to view it like a google.