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For a moment, I thought this would be a one-person social network where Stephen Wolfram can upvote his own posts.
by codeflo 13y ago
For a moment, I thought this would be a one-person social network where Stephen Wolfram can upvote his own posts.
- webwanderings 13y agoI thought he launched a Facebook competitor.
- wikiburner 13y agoBecause his Google competitor went so well? :) It was really exciting when Alpha launched. It seemed like search was really going to be shaken up a bit. I even remember Google being a little nervous, launching a big new public data service during Wolfram's big demo. Anyone know what the plans are for Alpha moving forward? Are they now content with their specialized audience, or are they still trying to go for real marketshare?
- rz2k 13y agoI tried to use it a lot when it came out. It seemed like the strategy would be to use trial and error as a method for teasing out tricks in the syntax. However, very little seems standardized, and what works one month, means something else the next month, so it's difficult to get "good" at using it. It is also difficult to be explicit about types, such as what you mean if you input "orange", or "Washington", and it doesn't seem to allow grouping with parentheses, etc—though admittedly I gave up pretty quickly when I got inconsistent results. It probably did become a better "computational engine" than Google Calculator, once Google Calculator seemed to shift to a smaller focus on what it could do. At one point I thought maybe its best functionality was as an alternative to Wikipedia, when comparing different members of a category, because the information would be consistently structured. Yet, the source data is pretty terrible. One, because they appear to have had little strategy for keeping it current, and, two, because without user input it's even more likely that the source is something bizarre, when with Wikipedia someone with domain specific knowledge would have been able to lend a hand.
- bonaldi 13y agoI use it a lot for natural language unit conversion; it's so much better at this than everything else — it's like Fantastical compared to Outlook's New Event dialog.
- rz2k 13y agoI can't find a reference to it anywhere, but for a while Google's calculator processed ridiculously esoteric natural language units. If I remember it correctly, after a thread on Reddit, they even implemented "refrigerator heights" and "fingernail years" as units to measure length.
- cleverjake 13y agoCould you perhaps be referring to smoots and beard seconds?
- rz2k 13y agoI'm not sure about smoots, but beard seconds sounds right, which would mean that it wasn't all original to the thread I remembered.
- drivers99 13y agoWolfram Alpha never was supposed to be a Google competitor. I'm not sure where you got that idea, but it seems to be a common misconception. It mostly takes your query in natural language and does computations on it, but also has various sources of facts and figures to incorporate into the calculations where applicable. Although there is a little bit over overlap in that Google tries to show information about the terms you searched alongside web search results, and will also do some computations (nothing compared to Wolfram Alpha though), they are not the same thing at all.
- nnethercote 13y agoThank heaven they worked a picture of Stephen into the post.