Yes, Wolfram Alpha can return irrelevant answers too if you input the search the wrong way, but with so much guidance on the site, that’s easy to work around. There’s not much in the way of competition for Wolfram Alpha, besides the AI that your chosen virtual assistant uses – and even then, devices like Alexa often return irrelevant answers. Wolfram Alpha's web app samples often prove to be more helpful than its search results (Image credit: Wolfram) But there are so many examples that you’ll get the hang of it in no time, as long as you take the time to learn how to communicate with it. Instead, you have to know how to search in Wolfram and the type of information to search for to get anywhere. For example, searches like “what are the healthiest foods,” “what’s on TV tonight,” and “Paleo diet” all returned nothing related to the search – when anything was returned at all. You can’t type just anything into Wolfram Alpha, like you can with Google, and expect to get results (or at least the right results). The search engine uses cookies, too, and while you can configure your browser to block cookies, the company says that may negatively impact your search results. Essentially, Wolfram Alpha can collect a lot of information about you, and it can be disclosed to third parties, as well as be used to add you to Wolfram’s mailing list (which you should be able to opt-out of). Wolfram Alpha is not a private search engine, and what they collect and how they use your information is laid out in their privacy policy. And there are several examples for each subtopic to help you figure out what to search for and how to search. Think of what you may ask Alexa (or your voice assistant of choice) on a normal day – things like, “What time is it in London?” or “What size turkey do I need for 15 people?” That’s the sort of information Wolfram can help you out with, so long as you know how to enter the search query. For someone like me (and in the web market, there are a lot of people like me), Alpha is breaking ground in a New Kind of Uselessness.The Society and Culture and Everyday Life categories will be the most helpful for users. However, I am a software engineer by trade, and the information I need is about Python module documentation, Apache configuration, and why some fucking snippet of CSS won't fucking render in fucking Internet Explorer fucking 6. So I don't feel all that put down that I can't figure out how Alpha is useful to anyone outside of a small audience of college professors and professional engineers.Īlpha is really good at telling you all sorts of information about mathematical expressions, showing you publicly available data about populations and geography, and comparing stock quotes. I know that in evaluating a Stephen Wolfram production, my meager intelligence quotient may not be sufficient to grasp the gravity of what I'm dealing with. I took some time to play around with Wolfram Alpha, and aside from being the best damn Wikipedia search engine since Powerset, the only noteworthy thing about it is that so far, Alpha is the finest example of the tragedy that results when an academic tries his hand at building a successful web product. Comment Wolfram Alpha, the not-quite-search-engine from self appointed mathematical genius Stephen Wolfram, launched last Friday, and oh my, has it been a great weekend for software reviewers.
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