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Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases (for now), not searching for your own name or an online newspaper/blog. It is purposely NOT Google.
by jpwagner 17y ago
Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases (for now), not searching for your own name or an online newspaper/blog.
It is purposely NOT Google.
- henning 17y agoI agree, trying to out-Google Google is a bad idea.
- paul9290 17y agoIt looks like the launch of this is going better then Cuil and most people seem to understand that they should give it a chance(time) to mature into something extremely useful! It looks very promising! Google began in 1997 or 98. I heard of it in 2000 but did not start using it til 2002/2003.
- asciilifeform 17y ago> Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases I have, so far, found it nearly useless academically. (Computational biology, to be specific.) Perhaps it will improve with time.
- jerf 17y agoHonest curiousity: What computational-biology question would you ask Wolfram|Alpha that you would expect a better answer to, vs. either Google, conventional journal search, or asking your own local computing resources? (In particular the questions that I know enough to ask, such as they are, would seem to be more suited to local resources.) (In fact, I'd open that question up to any other similar discipline.)
- asciilifeform 17y agoTry getting any but the most widely used protein sequences out of it.
- jkincaid 17y agoEven with academic queries it's very hit or miss. When you get something that returns relevant results it's a Eureka! moment, and you'll be impressed. But then you try a similar query and get zilch. I suspect academics will try their queries on Wolfram first and turn to Google if that doesn't work. But after seeing too many "no results found" messages, they might just skip the Wolfram step entirely. Google might not have the fancy graphs, but it almost always returns some kind of relevant data.