Computer…?

Recently Wolfram Alpha, a new kind of answering service on the internet was published. It was announced that it would be a totally new approach in how you get answers to your questions. Unlike engines like Google, who just show a list of hits that contain keywords you provided in your search it is actually a “thinking” search-engine. Like the computers in Star Trek, were you just name a question and the computer gives you the correct answer.

Great, I thought. Brilliant idea - lets try it. Well after the few searches I was more than disappointed. From the keywords I provided it was almost 80 % of the time not able to puzzle out what the question was about, showing either a message like: “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” or a result I wasn’t expecting. Only totally unambiguous keywords produced a correct result, and even then there was a chance that the result would not be what I expected. Keywords I provided: computer science, computer, apache, Vienna, Apache, PHP, Otago, Pi, knowledge, wolframalpha, wfrp and warhammer. Only Vienna, Pi and wolframalpha produced results I expected. Other keywords produced a result I wasn’t expecting, for instance when typing in computer I was expecting an explaination, what a computer is. WolframAlpha showed me the information about computer-magazine.

So at the current time I’m not sure what I should say about WolframAlpha. I’m aware that you cannot directly compare it to search engine, but its most obviously the first thing everybody tries to do. The idea behind it is great, but it is far to early to judge about it. Perhaps in a couple of years the technology might become better, but in the meantime I see no value in using it.