More and more news stories are cropping up regarding this up and coming search engine. In fact, some feel it might challenge Google’s dominance. I will study up on it more, give it a whirl and report back.
Have you used WolframAlpha? If so, leave a comment and tell me what you that out of it.
My initial impression is it needs a lot of work, that or I don’t understand it at all.
Last weekend my wife tried to use an old laptop running Windows 2000 for digital scrapbooking. She could not view thumbnails in Windows Explorer or MS Publisher. This morning I did a quick Google search and fixed the problem within 5 minutes, including some registry changes. I thought I’d try using Wolfram to get a solution. I entered my search words and it came back saying it did not understand the question. It said try asking a question, so I re-worded the search in sentence form and received the same result.
Taking a different tack, I tried entering tallest mountain and it quickly came back with the world’s 5 tallest mountains. Not a tough question, but at least it came back with something. Then I tried typing in a date (as suggested in the right frame for those new to Wolfram). Just for grins, I entered my birth date. After 10 minutes of watching it spin, I gave up and closed it out.
I think it has potential, but so far, I’m not impressed.
It appears that it is mostly a fact checking type search engine and what they are calling a “computational search engine”. It might be interesting to look up facts and it does present the fact based info in a nice format, but it certainly won’t replace (nor threaten) Google.
I can see it being a great tool for research.
I agree. Almost a quick version of Wikipedia…condensed.
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