Before you Dismiss Wolfram Alpha…

Jenny Sanderson — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:22:25 +0000

Wolfram Alpha has now been out for long enough for the backlash against it to have started across the blogs, and what a backlash. It appears that many of my fellow bloggers feel strangely protective of global superpower, Google and have written a deluge treatises on the subject of how Google performs much better at answering questions than WA. The only trouble is that many of them appeared to have missed the point slightly, so I’ve decided to debunk a few Wolfram Alpha Myths.

1. Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. Yep, that’s right Wolfram Alpha is intended as a medium to find out specific answers to questions, not to organise the crazy hotchpotch of information, and indeed miss-information, that fills the internet.

2. Wolfram Alpha can only answer where an answer actually exists. This is a big one, there is only one correct answer to the question ‘how many inches in a metre?’ (39.37 stats fans). However, a question like ‘how many new users did Oprah get Twitter?’ simply doesn’t have one, any answer would be an estimate therefore not within WA’s remit.

3. You can’t see the site sources because there aren’t any. Again, WA is not a search engine, it uses its own internal knowledge base to generate answers.

There, hope that helps clear up some confusion.

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Before you Dismiss Wolfram Alpha…