Wolfram Alpha Review

By Aditya Mhatre at 20 May, 2009, 4:52 am

Wolfram Alpha (WA) launched last Friday with a lot of people saying a lot of things about it. It was being positioned as a google killer even before it had launched. The website says that the objective of WA is to make world’s knowledge computable which in itself is bit vague. I think, Information is be computable but not knowledge. Wolfram is also assuming that entire world’s knowledge is online which in my opinion is wrong. The positioning could be “to make information on internet computable”.

In the first 10 minutes that I spent on Wolframalpha.com, I realised that WA will not have a mass market appeal and at the end of an hour, I had concluded that I wasn’t smart enough for Wolfram either. Over the years Google has had a “dumbing down” effect on the majorrity of internet population by making information so accessible that we no longer retain knowledge because we can google it whenever it is required. And now with WA, I am afraid that we might loose our analytical skills as well?

Another thing that the media hype and comparisons to Google did was misguide my expectations from WA. WA has a search engine flavour, in the sense that it takes an user input and provides you with answers just like a search engine does but WA’s query results are in the form of tables, graphs and numbers rather than in textual format like in Google search results. WA is not something that you can use to plan your next vacation but for more academic/research oriented activities. It definitely not meant to find opinion based search results but for fact based analysis about things that can be compared using numbers. This would probably reduce workload of college students by getting ready made charts for trends or forecasts but the trouble is that WA is not very user friendly. One has to enter very specific keywords in the propoer order to get the appropriate data. I tried a few queries like “India’s Internet Growth”, “Internet growth in USA” expecting to get bar charts showing the increase trend in internet subscriber but instead got a message saying “no search results available“! So Searching of Wolfram Alpha could be a niche skill that the geeks in college could master.

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram who is also the founder of Mathematica, computational language that statisticians swear by.

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Categories : Technology