4 ms·
Ask HN: What happened to Wolfram Alpha?
I am searching for "who won superbowl three years ago?" and came to WA first
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+won+superbowl+three+years+ago%3F
Surprisingly Google is able to handle it no problem.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=who+won+superbowl+three+years+ago%3F&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?
- smt88 8y agoWA flawlessly understood the question. It just seems to be lacking the right data.
- calanjoyce 8y agoThanks 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+for+the+2014-15+season http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+won+the+superbowl+f... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+the+super+bowl+with+the+patriots+vs+seahawks http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+the+super+bowl... === C. Alan Joyce Director of Content Development, Wolfram|Alpha
- calanjoyce 8y agoAnd 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+three+years+ago&assumption=%7B%22C%22,+%22years%22%7D+-%3E+%7B%22EnglishWord%22%7D http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+won+the+super+bowl+...
- freediver 8y agoThanks that makes a lot of sense!